To link to the entire object, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed the entire object, paste this HTML in websiteTo link to this page, paste this link in email, IM or documentTo embed this page, paste this HTML in website

Oral History Collection
To read the transcript and listen to the audio/video of this interview at the same time,
first download the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the
top of this screen. The transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select
the or option to the right of the screen.
Special Collections
Musselman Library
Interview with
John Chiocca
Interviewer: Elizabeth Ungemach
Interview Date: October 10 and November 1, 2009 Interviewee: Mr. John Chiocca
Interviewer: Elizabeth (Lisa) Ungemach
Date Interview Conducted: Saturday, October 10, 2009 and Sunday, November 1, 2009
CONTENT
Interview Subject’s Date of Birth: May 28, 1921
Home Town: Union City, NJ (grew up there; currently resides in Wayne, NJ)
Schooling during WWII: Degree in Engineering from Montclair State University
Date of Entrance into Service: enlisted August 5, 1942, no service until after college graduation
Job in Military Life: Communications officer in India
Important Experiences or Facts about the Interview Subject: His parents were from Italy and when he spent some time there he witnessed the conditions his mother’s brother was living in there; Enlisted in 1942 but didn’t start training until after college graduation in 1943; was in charge of men in the control tower of an Indian airport that was shipping goods over the Himalayan Mountains to China to aid that front of the war; and when he was scheduled to fly home after closing down operations in India, he was sent to Paris to oversee a group of men who were attending the Signal Corps school there.1
[This interview took place in the home of Mr. and Mrs. John and Doris Chiocca at 79 Mohawk Trail, Wayne, NJ on Saturday, October 10, 2009. I was interviewing Mr. Chiocca about his life with a specific focus on his World War II experiences. Mrs. Chiocca joined us at the kitchen table and added some interesting pieces of information and commented occasionally.]
Lisa Ungemach: Before we start talking about the war itself, we’re asked to get a general background of your life beforehand.
John Chiocca: Mhm. OK.
Ungemach: So, where were you born?
Chiocca: Born in Union City, New Jersey.
Ungemach: How big is your family?
Chiocca: We have four children, six grandchildren.
Mrs. Chiocca: You mean our family or his [points to Mr. Chiocca]?
Ungemach: No, I mean--.
Chiocca: You mean my family?
Ungemach: Yes, your siblings.
Chiocca: Oh, I just had one brother.
Ungemach: One brother. Was he older or younger?
Chiocca: Older.
Ungemach: Older. What was his name?
Chiocca: Pardon me?
Ungemach: What was his name?
Chiocca: Elso. E-l-s-o.
Ungemach: OK. And what did your parents do? What did your father do for a living?2
Chiocca: My father had a grocery store.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: And operated a grocery store.
Ungemach: Did you guys have a car?
Chiocca: Yes. When I went to college, I commuted, and my father bought a car for me to do that.
Ungemach: What kind of car was it?
Chiocca: I made the car pay for itself. Well, it was a hand-me-down. He had bought the car for my brother, who went to college also. That was about the second car but he bought that one new and then it was handed to me. It was a Ford V8 and we ran it until we couldn’t run it anymore and I made it pay for itself because I used to pick up students and take them to school and they paid me a weekly stipend for doing that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So the car paid for itself.
Ungemach: This was during college?
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: Yes. OK. And then, when you were growing up, did you listen to the radio a lot?
Chiocca: I don’t think it was a lot.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I don’t think we had it on a lot of the times. You did specifically put it on for certain things whether it was news or some entertainment.
Ungemach: Mhm
Chiocca: But not a lot. No. 3
Ungemach: Do you remember listening to President Roosevelt over the radio?
Chiocca: Yes. He was a spellbinder.
Ungemach: Yeah. His fireside chats.
Chiocca: Yeah. An older version of our present president.
Ungemach: So, when you were growing up, what did you and your brother do for fun?
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: My brother was into more athletics than I was. In the school itself. Although athletics in school were not anywhere near what they are today. I always tell the story that we had, in high school, one coach. And he coached everything, every sport, except tennis and something else and one of the other teachers did that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Every sport. One coach.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: What did we do for entertainment? We went to the movies once in a while and as I got older we went bowling.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: We played in the street a lot.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. Street ball. Lot of street ball. We lived in the city and you played in the street. Didn’t have as many cars then.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: So, elementary and middle school. You went to local public school or--?4
Chiocca: Public school. Elementary, which was considered through the eighth grade; there were no middle schools then. And then you went to high school.
Ungemach: OK. And did you enjoy school?
Chiocca: I did. I enjoyed learning. I always was one who enjoyed learning. So I learned.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But I don’t think we did anything near the amount of work that kids do now. When we got home, pretty much was play time.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So our studying was done in school.
Ungemach: What were your favorite subjects?
Chiocca: In high school, probably the sciences, the various science subjects and math. I took French as a language and I enjoyed French very much. Those were about it.
Ungemach: Did you have any dreams of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No?
Chiocca: No, no. I think our main focus on that time was how do I make a living?
Ungemach: Yeah. Because of the Depression and--.
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: So you went to school at Montclair State University?
Chiocca: Yep.
Ungemach: Yes. And why did you decide to attend Montclair?5
Chiocca: I think because my brother had been through it and the price was right. I really, I focused on the fact that I thought that I’d like to into an engineering school and I was looking at Penn State.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But the tuition was much, much greater than my family could afford. Whereas Montclair State, at that time, I think was $50 a semester.
Ungemach: Wow.
Chiocca: It was either 50 a semester or a year, I don’t remember which. But it was in that range.
Ungemach: Jeez.
Chiocca: So it was relatively easy to achieve it.
Ungemach: And so you decided when you were looking at schools that you wanted to study engineering?
Chiocca: Well, when I got into Montclair, it was strictly in the sciences. That was my major. And a minor in math.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I always liked those. So, if I had gone out teaching, it would have been in those fields, yes.
Ungemach: Mhm. When did you first start, I guess, segueing into the war years, 1937, when did you first start hearing about fighting going on in Europe?
Chiocca: Well, of course, the date we remember was September ’39, I think it was September ’39 when the Nazis invaded Poland. However, before that, the, and I would say, two, three, four, five years before that, we could see the build-up in there. And Mussolini had decided to take Italy into Africa and took some African nations. And nobody could hold him back. 6
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: And then Hitler pulled his-- so it was somewhere in that time period.
Ungemach: Was there any--?
Chiocca: ’37, ’38, ’39.
Ungemach: Anything about Russia at that point?
Chiocca: No, not really.
Ungemach: Not really?
Chiocca: Nope.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then how closely did you follow news--?
Chiocca: Daily newspapers. That was most of it. And in those days the up-to-the-minute news was the newsboy would come around, yelling “Extra, extra!” And you’d run out of the house and buy an extra. In the middle of the day. When there was something to report that you didn’t want to wait till the next day.
Ungemach: So, when Hitler started coming to power, what was the general feeling about him? What did you think about what he was doing?
Chiocca: I think most people thought he was a nasty person and that there were a lot of problems, but that they were European problems.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: It wasn’t our problem.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: At the beginning.
Ungemach: And then he, I think it was in the late 1930s how he had originally had an agreement with Stalin but then he reneged on that.7
Chiocca: Right.
Ungemach: Just sort of a continuation of this negative feeling about him.
Chiocca: Right. Yeah.
Ungemach: And then the same thing with Mussolini in Italy?
Chiocca: Yes, yeah. And we, as a country, I think we had a very neutral but not really neutral; we disfavored those people, but it was hands off.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We believed that we shouldn’t get involved. As a nation.
Ungemach: Was there any particular, why was that feeling--?
Chiocca: I think it was just the feeling we had after World War I. It just carried though. That we wouldn’t get ourselves involved in another--, we felt it was one of those typical uprisings that happens between countries in Europe. Historically.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: And we were not going to get involved. Most of us were of that feeling.
Ungemach: So then the US started putting in place programs like Lend-Lease. So what was your feeling about that, about those kinds of programs?
Chiocca: I think that people agreed with it at that point. We were, we felt we weren’t involved but we were helping a nation that we felt was right, which was England, and Lend-Lease fit the bill and I don’t think that there were objections to Lend-Lease. It was acceptable.
Ungemach: Was there ever a point when you thought that the US would have to become involved in the war before Pearl Harbor?
Chiocca: I think there was a minority that felt that, but I think probably most people felt that we could steer clear of it. 8
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: There was still that feeling that it’s their problem, not ours; and help to England, yes, but that we would be physically involved in it? I thought that we were not going to do it.
Ungemach: OK. So you were in Montclair State, you were a sophomore or a junior when Pearl Harbor happened?
Chiocca: In ’41 yes, I was a junior. [thinking] I’m trying to think. In ’41, that was the end of sophomore year, beginning of junior year, just the beginning of junior year.
Ungemach: OK. So what were thoughts about--?
Chiocca: Well, things changed dramatically. Overnight. Overnight. It no longer was something that we felt that maybe Roosevelt was being a little bit too--, sticking his nose into things, up until that point, but we would stay out of it. But once Pearl Harbor happened then immediately, immediately, the whole country just changed right away.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And knew that we were involved, would be involved, and that we’d get into it. It changed completely.
Ungemach: Because it was so shocking.
Chiocca: Right. We did not expect that. Did not expect that.
Ungemach: So did your brother join any of the forces?
Chiocca: Not at that point. I don’t remember. He was teaching school, and he was teaching high school at the time; no, and he was out of it, and the first thing he did was--. There was a need for teachers at the University of Illinois, I think it was, where they had a contract with the federal government to teach the soldiers, I think, that were attached to the Air Corps at that time, mathematics and the subjects necessary to do that, so he left the school job that he had and went 9
out to the University of Illinois and was teaching military personnel that needed background that they needed to accomplish their goals, which was basically mathematics that he was working on at that time.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then how else was, before you entered the service, how else was your family involved in the war effort?
Chiocca: My mother and father weren’t. They stayed home and operated the store and they could see things changing. Foods became less plentiful, things were in short supply, prices started to go up.
Ungemach: How did they deal with that? In the store?
Chiocca: I don’t think there was anything different doing, they just put up with whatever it was.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Rationing came along and everybody was allowed certain poundage of butter per month and certain sugar, so my father had to get the coupons that they were issued and keep them so that they could turn them into the wholesalers to get that supply. So, it became paperwork and he couldn’t order more than he was allowed, so everybody was cutting back. So it was something that you sort of worked into naturally and put up with it. Everybody did it.
Ungemach: Became a part of life.
Chiocca: Yep. Yeah.
Ungemach: OK. What influenced your decision to stay in school after 1941?
Chiocca: Well, I don’t remember the sequence because my brother was there, and then he was in the program for pilot training.
Ungemach: Mhm. 10
Chiocca: And he was too old for the military part of it, so they were teaching him and civilians to ferry the planes where they were needed from the factory and so forth and so on, and that--. I don’t remember the sequence. That got closed down by the government, and he was put into the army. I was in school, so we’re talking December of ’41, and pretty soon the students were signing up to go into the military. I decided that I would sign up and I was sworn in in August, August the 5th I think, of ’42.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: In other words, we’re talking about 6-8 months after Pearl Harbor, and I was instructed to stay in school. They saw what I was doing and they liked some of the subjects I was taking, so they wanted me to finish the subjects.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I had the math, I was doing math. I had some photography courses in the developing-- not only just taking pictures but what photography was then. And they ultimately suggested that I stay in school. And that was again in August of ’42, about 6 months after Pearl Harbor, or 7 months after Pearl Harbor. And that went on for quite a while and I kept asking about my plans, what was going to happen. I should say, in the mean time, the college, realizing what went on, put everything on a very sped up basis.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We no longer were two semesters a year or anything [laughs]. We went 6 days a week and we went nights and so forth and we were able to complete our courses much earlier. And the Air Corps that I was signed up in was watching these developments and at first they told me they wanted me to get into meteorology.
Ungemach: Mhm. 11
Chiocca: So with that they demanded again that I take the certain courses and so forth and so on, which is what I had expected would happen. And this went on and on and on and on and I’d keep checking on and they just wanted me to keep taking those courses [laughs]. I guess they felt it was better if I took them before I went in and then they wouldn’t have to give them to me.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: To make a long story short, they apparently had enough meteorologists and then they decided that they would put me into photography and I was supposed to go out to one of the military things in [thinking] in Colorado, Colorado for photography. And that was again, just kept putting off and putting off, and final word came that they didn’t need me anymore in that, and the meteorology had been put out. I didn’t have calculus. I had gone for the courses that involved navigation, celestial navigation and all that sort of stuff, spherical trigonometry, did all of that. I didn’t take the one thing that they wanted. So it ended up that, in August, this is a year later, in August of [thinking] 40--.
Ungemach: 3?
Chiocca: ’44 then.
Mrs. Chiocca: ’43.
Chiocca: I started in ’42, so it was August of ’43. They decided that they wanted me in communications. It was strange [laughs]. And that’s when they gave me a railroad ticket and said get to Florida and I went to officer training school in Florida.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So you see how long they put off--.
Ungemach: Yeah. 12
Chiocca: Here’s a wartime. And I’d gotten a degree by then and as a matter of fact I’d gotten a degree before they called me. I actually went to work in the shipyard! I was working in the shipyard when they finally called me up! [laughs]
Ungemach: So, because of the sped up classes, you were finished with college before 1943?
Chiocca: I was finished in early ’43, in January of ’43.
Ungemach: So you were--?
Chiocca: I was ready.
Ungemach: You tried to enlist in ’42--.
Chiocca: Oh, I had enlisted, I swore in, I was a member of the military! [laughs.] That’s what is strange, strange thing!
Ungemach: They kept changing what they wanted you to do.
Chiocca: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Ungemach: Just back, for a second, you said your brother was ferrying--?
Chiocca: He was supposed to ferry planes, and that changed and they put him into the Army Air Corps, sent him to North Africa, and he was a load master on freight shipments through the air, so he was in the military.
Ungemach: OK. And then you were in officer training in Florida?
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: Where in Florida was that?
Chiocca: Boca Raton.
Ungemach: Ok. And what did that involve?
Chiocca: Mainly basic military and geared toward the leadership of officers with the basic stuff.
Ungemach: OK. 13
Chiocca: And then from Florida we were sent to North Carolina, where it became more the outdoor military things, camps and all that sort of outdoor stuff.
Ungemach: Where in North Carolina?
Chiocca: Goldsborough. Middle of North Carolina. That was started in August in Florida and somewhere late [thinking] September, August-September, somewhere around early October I was in North Carolina and then a month or two after that training I was sent to Yale University for communications training. So I was in Yale by November of that year. So it was August to November for just basic officer training and then specifically for communications training in Yale University.
Ungemach: OK. Why did they decide on Yale?
Chiocca: They had their big school there for this purpose set up by the Army Air Corps. They took over parts of these universities. We were not mixed in with the regular curriculum of Yale. We were there for a particular curriculum that the Army Air Corps wanted.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And we would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, they’d feed us, and then we did gymnastics or physical training until noon. That was half the day. And then we’d eat and then we’d go to classes. And they a figured out a way that you couldn’t fall asleep in classes: we had no desks. You had to stand up.
Ungemach: [laughs.] Wow.
Chiocca: You stood up, no sitting down. You stood up for the entire afternoon. Never had a break. They just kept batting you with all this information. And then you were given dinner at 5 or 6 o’clock, somewhere in there, and then you went back to your room and you studied. And lights out was at 11 and we’d get under the blankets with a flashlight and keep studying because 14
they’d kick you out. If you didn’t keep up with the curriculum, you’d get kicked out very quickly. So we’d study till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and then you got up again at 5:30 or 6 and went through it all.
Ungemach: Jeez. What kind of things were they teaching you in communications?
Chiocca: The basics of radio communications, starting with the basis of the code and so forth and how to send code by hand, which we had a minimal experience because we weren’t expected to do it but they taught us how to do it so that we would know when other people--.We’re going back to basics now. You actually had a key and with keying, the message is to someone else and, since this was for the Air Corps, it mainly was communications either within the system of any such if necessary but mostly for arrivals and departures from take-off to landing and then we operated the control tower and controlled the airport itself.
Ungemach: Where was this?
Chiocca: Anywhere.
Ungemach: Anywhere.
Chiocca: Anywhere. Later on I got to do Newark Airport, but any airport. The Air Force [Corps] controlled everything after that. Foreign and so forth and so on. Now some of the major airports still had some FAA people, Federal Administration people, doing the traffic control, but something, like Newark or LaGuardia and so forth, had so much traffic that they kept it. Most of the other smaller airports were all run by the Air Force, or the Air Corps at that time. So we did that from a school standpoint until I graduated in April of ’44 and my first assignment was to Virginia at Langley Field.
Ungemach: Mhm.15
Chiocca: Then you got training, not from a school angle, but from--. You were actually assigned a job but it was under somebody else. They weren’t going to let you do all these things until you really knew what it was about. So I spent time in the tower, because we were controlling the airplanes. I spent time with the people who sent messages on whatever-- We didn’t send administrative messages, that was left to the army, but it was messages that had to do with transporting or moving aircraft and so forth.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That type of thing. And finally, the most important part, especially at Newark, we were concerned with the landing systems. We were learning at that time how to land the plane in bad weather, cause up until then airplanes flew in good weather, not in bad weather. But the war changed all of that and we had to land in bad weather. Radar came on at the end of the time, but before that we had equipment that could land planes, even though the pilot couldn’t see anything.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So that was one of the main things we did. In my first assignment after Langley was in Newark Airport and I was in charge of the people who actually did the set-up and installed the equipment and trained the people how to use it so that you could land the planes in bad weather. And that’s what they were doing back then. And the military was doing all of it because civilians had no abilities in that, this was all brand new. And then radar came in at the end of that.
Ungemach: Mhm. So, you went from Yale to Langley to Newark and then, when did you end up overseas?
Chiocca: OK, I was at Newark not too long, some months, and then I got my overseas notice and that was a slow go. They put me on a train to Texas and there was a week or two in Texas where they got you ready for overseas and then they shipped you to California where you waited 16
another week to get on a boat, a ship, and then they shipped me out to the Pacific and we didn’t-- No one knew where we were going.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And we were onboard the ship over 30 days and we finally figured out we’re crossing the equator, so we weren’t going to Japan or anything and we ended up going around the bottom of Australia and went into India.
Ungemach: Mhm. So, you just got on a ship and you were getting shipped off somewhere, you didn’t know where?
Chiocca: [shakes head] No idea.
Ungemach: Wow.
Chiocca: Never knew. We didn’t know we were going to India until we got to the port and we knew we were in India. Nobody told us where we were going.
Mrs. Chiocca: Now, in that time, we used to say, “Loose lips sink ships.”
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: Not like it is now.
Mr. Chiocca: We couldn’t sink the ship, we didn’t know where we were going! Oh, the reason it took so long, by the way, some movements were done by convoys that were protected by submarines and other naval vessels. And then they had some of the newer ships, like the one that I was on, which was a troop carrier, and it was made to go faster and it had no convoy. We had no protection of anybody else.
Ungemach: Mhm.17
Chiocca: And what they did was they zigzagged all across the Pacific so that the submarines couldn’t get a beat on what you were doing because they kept changing the route we went. We went south of Australia and back the other way, so that’s why it took so long. Not because it was a slow ship, but we were on the water a long time.
Ungemach: What were you doing on the ship, to occupy yourselves?
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t a magazine to read, there was no program, there was no radio, nothing. Nothing.
Mrs. Chiocca: [softly] Tell her how you slept.
Mr. Chiocca: They got you up at 5 o’clock in the morning to do nothing
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: And they fed you.
Mrs. Chiocca: Slops.
Mr. Chiocca: Frankfurters and baked beans for breakfast, they gave you the necessary [laughs, ironic] energy, and then sometimes I think we got a little sandwich in between, and then we would get a dinner about 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: Tell her how you slept.
Mr. Chiocca: What’s that?
Mrs. Chiocca: How you slept.
Mr. Chiocca: Oh, slept. Well, we were lucky, we were officers, so we were only 3 high; the enlisted men were 4 deep.
Ungemach: Wow.18
Chiocca: We had to sneak in and, it was layered. And we were also fortunate; they put us in what was the brig, the prison. They didn’t use it as a prison, but we could sleep in there, we had a little more elbow room than the other guys who were in these cavernous places with all these people. I forgot how many we had on board, but it was a huge number of people.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And it was so bad down below that some of us started to sleep on the deck; we got into warm waters and we’d sleep on the steel deck at night until the captain found out we were doing it and that ended that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And then our clothes got so stinky; there was no change of clothes or anything. The clothes got so stinky so we got the idea, somebody got a rope and we were living in fatigues at that time and they put a bunch of fatigues, and tied them to the rope, and threw them off the keel [possibly stern meant here] of the ship.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: So the propellers went around and they got washed in salt water.
Ungemach: Jeez.
Chiocca: Until the captain found out about that!
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: So, you learned to do things and some things you got away with. Some you didn’t. We had a lot of good times. They had an interesting thing happen. When we landed in Australia, we stopped at a couple of ports in Australia, and we dropped off some Canadian Air Force officers, who were a bunch of crybabies.
Ungemach: [laughs.]19
Chiocca: Didn’t seem to know that we were in a war. And we see coming on board these guys from Australia. They had long coats on and they were carrying valises. We went on board stupidly, [laughs.] we had backpacks, a rifle across our back, and stuff like that. And these came with nice valises. They came on board, we found out they had been in India, they were back in Australia, and now they were returning to India and they were prepared for it. They had their suitcases full of liquor.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: No clothes, just liquor. And they were good people.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A lot different than we expected. Very good.
Ungemach: Were there any other non-Americans on the ship?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: Just the few Canadians?
Chiocca: Just some Australians. Yeah. First Canadians, then Australians. That was it. Yeah.
Ungemach: What officer rank were you?
Chiocca: By then I was a second lieutenant and I had been upgraded to first lieutenant. I received the orders just before I’d gone shipboard. [laughs.]
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: No, it was just before, in Texas, just before I got to California, that I was upgraded to first lieutenant.
Ungemach: So after training school in Florida you were a second lieutenant?
Chiocca: Second Lieutenant. Then first lieutenant. Right.
Ungemach: OK. Did you know anything about the situation in India before you got there?20
Chiocca: Nope.
Ungemach: Nothing?
Chiocca: Well, only because I had a group of enlisted men who had done work in India to install the landing systems for the Air Corps. And they had come back to the United States and they were the people that were installing in Newark when I took over.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I was the only officer and the enlisted men were the ones with the real knowledge. I only had the supervisory knowledge, they had the real knowledge. And these people had been in India and some of them told me some things about India, but I never expected to go there. So that’s all I knew.
Ungemach: Where in India were you stationed?
Chiocca: Well, I landed in Calcutta and they moved us to a replacement depot, which means you stay there until your orders give you where you’re going to go. It just so happened that one of my superior officers when I was in Florida and Langley Field, and I’d lost track of him completely, was in India.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I’m getting off the ship and there he is on the dock, waiting for me. And I couldn’t believe it. He was standing there and I says, “What’s going on?” And he says, “I’m waiting for you.” He knew that I was coming. And he was grabbing me for his unit.
Ungemach: What was his name?
Chiocca: [thinking] Oh, I’d have to think about it. He was a captain at that time, he was one grade above me. And he was stationed up in the northern parts of India, at the foothills of the Himalayas where I was then sent. And again, we went to this replacement depot but then they 21
shipped us out within a day or so. And that was an interesting trip. We were on railroad trains and the first time we got to a river, the train stopped, and they never tell you anything, we get off the train and they put us on boats that were somewhere between a canoe and a rowboat, made a little bit larger, and they had put some kind of a kicker on it to get us across the river. And we got on the other side of the river and there was a train waiting on the other side of the river.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We got back on that train and they did that about twice. And I learned, of course, what happened is that during the monsoon seasons, all the bridges get washed out and then until they can get new bridges built, which they do rather quickly from bamboo, they build bamboo and get railroad over it! And we were in that period of time when bridges were still not rebuilt, so they were ferrying us across to another train on the other side. And we eventually got up to this station right at the end of civilization just before the Himalayan Mountains into China, and found out what we were there for.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And that was the underbelly of the war where all the supplies were coming in and had to get over the Himalayas into China so that China could fight the Japanese. And that’s what we had to do. Nobody told us that’s where we were going, but that was it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That’s the first time I started doing something [laughs] that had a value rather than just training.
Ungemach: Or supervising.
Chiocca: So now were talking May of ’45. While we were on board the ship, Germany had surrendered, so we were still fighting the Japanese, but the war was over in Europe. 22
Ungemach: Oh OK. So you were in charge of getting supplies from--?
Chiocca: Actually, no, my training was with the communications people. So, we had people operating the control towers, in other words controlling the planes.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: We had other people operating the communications devices so that we could tell--. In other words, when a plane left, you had to report what time it was leaving and what time it would arrive at its destination, so you knew that it got there and you’d get back a message. So we were a messaging service, and the third thing we did, and the most important thing we did, was we installed and operated the guidance system that was able to get these planes over the mountains.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: In other words, how do you get the planes from point A to point B unless they’ve got some device? And we had devices that that they could contact and navigate their way over the mountains. And the joke was, they said on a clear day, you don’t need the device. All you’ve gotta do is look down and see all the planes that didn’t make it. Because the failure rate was very high.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A lot of planes didn’t make it. In wartime they just keep shoveling it over. So that was the thing. We were at that airport, moving huge quantities of goods into China to meet the Japanese from the other end.
Ungemach: So, by the time you’d arrived, Germany had surrendered.
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: Did you find that out when you got to India or had you heard about that while still on board the ship?23
Chiocca: I think we found out about it when we were still aboard the ship. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Ungemach: And what was sentiment about that?
Chiocca: Well, great! Now all the energy could go against Japan. And we had no idea that the end was coming so suddenly.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: Of course. Everybody thought that with the island hopping and the eventual invasion of Japan was the ultimate prize. The Japanese had not only China, but they had all of Southeast Asia. They had Indochina, Singapore and all, they had captured all of that, so it was a question of pushing them back.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And they did get pushed back and then we had control stations, radio stations and so forth, in Singapore and Vietnam and Siam then, and Burma, we had all those stations in there.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: All operated out of India.
Ungemach: OK. Just about life while you were stationed in India. Were you receiving rations or were you trying local fare?
Chiocca: Some of everything. Some of it was rations, a little bit was rations. We had mess halls so they tried to put things together. Some things we never got and we were on our own. We tried to buy some food. It’s amazing how you suddenly decide that some things that you took for granted you never see again. We never saw eggs and Americans love their eggs.
Ungemach: Yep.24
Chiocca: And usually we’d find some pilot who was going back from where we were in the Himalayas back to Calcutta and we’d all chip in $10 and ask him to buy eggs. And they’d bring up the eggs and we’d have some eggs to eat for a day or so. I remember one time we all chipped in and he came back and all the eggs were rotten. He couldn’t get off the ground fast enough, he was held up and in the heat they just went bad. So we were kind of downhearted. [laughs.]
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Some of the rations, they were able to do pretty well with. Sometimes we had very little to eat, but you were OK, it didn’t matter. We all looked yellow, by the way.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: They gave us pills to stave off the mosquito and--.
Ungemach: Malaria?
Chiocca: Malaria. And our skin was all yellow. We all looked like we were Japanese.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: I said, “Thank goodness my mother doesn’t see me looking like this!”
Ungemach: [laughs.] Where were you staying? Did they have a base or--?
Chiocca: Well, the airport was the main thing, and we were not staying at the airport. We were a mile away or something and we were all in huts, little bamboo huts that they put up. Two officers to a hut.
Ungemach: Mhm. The weather in India is like hot season--.
Chiocca: Three seasons.
Ungemach: Three seasons?
Chiocca: Three seasons. It was hot, cool, and rainy. [laughs.]
Ungemach: How was it adjusting to that? 25
Chiocca: The rainy season was hard. That was hard because you could get a tremendous amount of rain in any one day. And, I guess you could say, you went from the heat, when it was so hot that you couldn’t wait for the rains to come, and then when they came, there was so much of it that you couldn’t wait for it to leave. But basically, when it was very hot, even during the rain, we walked around in shorts and shoes and nothing. We had no insignia of who we were, officers and enlisted men, nobody cared what rank you were. And there was nothing formal, nobody saluted or anything, you just did your job. We looked like a bunch of slobs.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: But then, when it got cooler, that was more manageable, you could at least live through it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But either the hot season or the rainy season--. In other words, two-thirds of the time you were very uncomfortable. Some of the people got skin conditions from the rot and everything else. Luckily I didn’t.
Ungemach: Were there incidences of huts floating away or--?
Chiocca: In that area we were not near any big rivers that I can remember. The big rivers were nearer to the sea. Calcutta, of course, has huge rivers. In low spots, the ground would be filled with rain and all, but the runways were usually kept pretty good because the runways were put up quickly and so what they did, basically, was laid a flat ground, and then we put corrugated steel on the ground so the planes would land on the corrugated steel, so you kept it pretty good, pretty easy.
Ungemach: Mhm. 26
Chiocca: And an interesting thing: the first time I saw it, I didn’t understand what was going on but I looked at the airfield and there’s this huge airfield and it’s green from grass and weeds and so forth, and there’s a complete line of Indian men, sitting down on their haunches, with scissors in their hands, and their cutting the grass.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: 50 or 100 men across, moving down the runways, cutting the grass.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That’s what cheap labor means.
Ungemach: Jeez. Where you in contact with your family much when you were stationed in India?
Chiocca: No. You’d get a letter once in a while; you’d send a letter once in a while. It wasn’t very good contact, no.
Ungemach: I guess one of the interesting things is, you always hear about soldiers smoking or trading their cigarettes with other people for other things. Was there much of that going on?
Chiocca: A little bit there; liquor ration or beer ration. And you could do some trading. But there wasn’t much trade up there so I ended up giving a lot of stuff away. I didn’t smoke. I’d give it away. Later on, when I wasn’t in India, later it became a different thing. We’ll talk about that later.
Ungemach: Was it easy to hear about what was going on with Japan and with--?
Chiocca: We didn’t have much news. They had one line or something about some attack on an island or something but no real news. A little bit.
Ungemach: Did you have any contact with Indian military at all or was it just--?
Chiocca: British. 27
Ungemach: British?
Chiocca: British military, yes. We didn’t have much contact then with the British. Later on, after the Japanese were out and it was our business to leave India, that was another facet of what I got into.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I became a liaison officer between the American military and the British and then I would meet with the British.
Ungemach: Did you have much to do with them when you were at the airport?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No?
Chiocca: No. We ran our own show and the British had nothing to do with it. The British were there, what, hundreds of years and they were still using bathrooms with a pitcher of water and so forth. And we come in there and we build latrines and we have running water in the showers. It was cold water, but we had showers.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A completely different way of life. But we got along. There was no rancor.
Ungemach: Mhm. Did you have any contact with Indian civilians?
Chiocca: Sure. I had my man Friday, I had my own personal servant. It cost me a few cents a day and he would come here every morning and have my clothes ready for me when I got up and I’d shower, and clean up, put my clothes on, and I’d go out to work and he would stay there and get my clothes washed and ironed and everything else. Make the bed and all. A couple cents a day did it. It was easy. Everybody had them. Labor was so plentiful at almost no cost, everybody 28
had them. But, as far as with Indian civilians of a nature that had to do with our job, no. None whatsoever. We sort of took over.
Ungemach: Yeah. Did he speak English?
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: Yes?
Chiocca: They spoke English, yes. I didn’t speak Hindu, but they spoke English.
Ungemach: Was there any conversation about the British being there or about Gandhi at all?
Chiocca: No. There were riots at the end of the war against Japan and then India started to make their move. There were riots and the riots were mainly in the cities of Calcutta and so forth and when we were up north, up in the Himalayas, we didn’t know anything about it. Later on, when I was down in Calcutta, we were kept on base. We weren’t allowed in where the civilians were. We didn’t want to be involved in their troubles.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But up north, no.
Ungemach: How long were you stationed up in the northern part of India? Did you move elsewhere?
Chiocca: No, I was there. I moved a couple places around up there. After Japan lost and we knew that the war was ending, then it became a problem of folding everything back in. That became a bigger job than I ever had before.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Because we had the whole Indian continent covered with people, which probably is the main part of the story, in a way. The decision gets made to get out and pretty soon you’re turning everything around and shipping people home and there was a question of how many ships can 29
we get in, not for me but for the higher ups, and we had to then prioritize who goes out. And there was a priority: married men with children, as long as they had some time there. If you just came in the week before, no, but if they’d been there a year or so, they got priority.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And at that point, most of the work becomes a question of closing down rather than operating systems and we start to close down all our bases where we had equipment for navigating across the Hump [slang for the Himalayan Mountains] and bringing all those people in. And that meant not only the people, but the station, the antennas, and all the equipment and bringing them in, collecting it and so forth and so on. And at first, it’s rather orderly and most of it was turned over to the Indian government. We brought almost nothing back to the United States.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Vehicles, all the equipment, the stations, the antennas, and so forth and so on. And we would get orders and I would be at meetings. By then I had been a captain and my commanding officer was a major and he had been there quite long, so he was one of those that got shipped out early [laughs] because he had been there long.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And suddenly I was in charge cause I was the highest ranking one there. So I was meeting with the higher-ups. We met the commanding general of the theater in India and he laid down the plan of how you would go about getting people out and so forth and so on. And finally I can remember very vividly the last meeting we had. He said, “OK.” By then we had gotten rid of a lot of people.
Ungemach: Mhm. 30
Chiocca: He said, “We will have the last troop ship in Calcutta at such and such a time. Get your men there or they’re going to swim home.” And we started really buckling down and it was a question of how do we get rid of all this stuff? We had equipment all over the place and a lot of it was just abandoned.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We didn’t have enough people to even try to move it anyplace; we just left it. I can remember turning some of it over to the Indian government and one morning we were expecting the government of India to show up to get official notice of it and this young man comes up. He’s got a clipboard and he’s looking and looking and I says, “What’s going on?” He says, “I came here to get the equipment.” I says, “Really?”
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: And we had Quonset huts, these are the big metal buildings that you put up temporarily, stacked with all this equipment that does everything you want. [taps table.] And I looked at him, I gave him the keys, and I thought, “Boy, that’s not going to last very long.”
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Wait till those people get a hold of this stuff. And we left. And he stood there looking, no guards or anything.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Millions of millions of millions of dollars of stuff left in there. That’s war. And I was very, very concerned. I had one last detachment down in the southern part of India and we had wired them about getting back, but some of the wires were down and some of the equipment wasn’t working right, and we never heard what happened. And I was really worried because there was that ship that was leaving and they had to get on there. And finally, the night before, 31
this railroad train comes up with four or five cars on it and the commander of the unit gets off and he said, “We had a tough time. We commandeered a railroad.”
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And they had their cars on there, they had jeeps, and all the equipment, and I said, “We’re just going to throw it away, you should have just left it there.” Well, he didn’t know. So we got him and his men on board that day and there was just a few of us left. We had three aircraft left; one of them was for spare parts, one was for some food and more parts, and one was for personnel. And I had two or three men under me left and the supervising aid, they call him the ATC, that ran the airports and so forth, he had a bunch of men, and we took off. And we were going home. And we started to fly west. We flew over India, west, and flew to Cairo. No, that wasn’t it; no, no, I’m wrong. We stopped, where did we stop? [thinking.] Oh, I know. We stopped in Abadan [in Iran], one of those desert places where our forces were fighting when we were in Iraq, in there with all the sand. I can remember, we landed there at night, and we got out, and it must have been about 120 degrees in the shade. In the night. [laughs.]
Ungemach: [laughs.] Wow.
Chiocca: And all we saw was sand. And we just laid down and went to sleep for a while. And they fixed up the aircraft, gave us some more food, and we ate something, and then we took off and we went to Cairo. And then we stayed in Cairo for a couple of days, getting ready. We were supposed to be flying home. This was the remnants. The only people left behind in India were what were called the Gray’s Registration people. And they were there to see that anybody who had been killed would be taken care of. But the rest of us were out, so we were flying. So we left Cairo and the next stop was Naples and then we’d be flying home from there, I think. And I got to Naples and I was reporting; by then I was reporting to the next echelon, which was in--. I’m 32
sorry, we stopped in Rome [taps table.] and I was reporting to the next echelon above me, which was in Naples. And I called the commander there and I told him we were in Rome and he said, “Come down to Naples.” “No,” I said, “I’ve got orders to report back to the United States.” He says, “Come down, come to Naples.” I said, “I’m on--.” He said, “Forget it. Come down.” So I took all my stuff off the aircraft and people wouldn’t believe me. “You’re leaving?” I said, “I’ve been told to go to Naples.” So I went to Naples, grabbed a plane and went to Naples. And he talked to me for a while cause he had been my overseer from India, in Naples, so I didn’t know who the guy was, really. And he told me what they were doing in Naples and so forth, and he had a couple of things he wanted covered and he said, “But you haven’t had any R and R, rest and recuperation, for 2 years.” I says, “Right.” So he says, “Take a breather.” So he put me on two weeks, sent me to Switzerland. [laughs.] And I just relaxed for a while. And then I came back and I’m ready to go home. And he says, “Well, I need somebody, I’ve got something to do.” I said, “I’m going home.” He says, “I got something you’ve got to do.” So he was sending a group of men, I think it was 75 men or something like that, who were Air Corps Communication Specialists, but all of our training had been through the Signal Corps of the army. So he was sending these men to Paris, where the Signal Corps had a big school. And he needed a couple of people, so he gave me a junior officer, a lieutenant, and myself, and took this plane full of guys up to Paris. And they were there to be taught. And that was for 3 months. And my duties were every morning, I would show up at their camp, make sure they were there [laughs.] and I’d turn them over to the Army Signal Corps for training. And I had the rest of the day to myself, in Paris. So I learned French, I learned a lot about Paris, and I had a good time. And 3 months later, I went back to Naples, and he says, “I’ve got a good job for you.” “I don’t want it; I want to go home.”33
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: He says, “I got a good job, you’ve got to listen.” And he wanted to send me to Spain, which, of course, had been neutral in the war. And he said that he needed a communications guy down in Spain. He says, “No uniform. Civilian clothes. You’re not a member of the military. You’re civilian. You understand me?” And I says, “Yeah, I understand you.” I says, “No, I don’t want to go.” He says, “One year. You commit yourself to one year.” He made it sound real good. So I began to think about it. I got my mother and father, they’re elderly, wondering when I’m coming home, and he wants to get me into Spain, and it was good because it was liaison and it was undercover. And one year. And I finally didn’t get an agreement on what I wanted out of it. He couldn’t give into that. So, I didn’t go. I did come home. And that was the end of that.
Ungemach: Mhm. Just to backtrack and flesh things out. So, when did you first hear about the atomic bomb and the end of the war?
Chiocca: I think the day it happened.
Ungemach: The day it happened?
Chiocca: Yeah. Those things do travel fast.
Ungemach: Yeah. What did you think about that decision?
Chiocca: We didn’t know much about it. I think the civilians here learned more about it than we did. We’d get those news sniffs either on the teletype or some other message and we knew little about it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We didn’t know that 60,000 people were incinerated. All we knew was that one big bomb was down there and blew up a whole city.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then that they decided to surrender?34
Chiocca: Yes, yeah. Well, they didn’t surrender after one bomb, it took two.
Ungemach: Yeah. So then you started closing up shop. Were you just in charge of the northern part by the Himalayas where you were or were you eventually in charge of--?
Chiocca: We were in charge of half of India, the eastern half; the western half was out of Karachi, which was on the other side of India. We had half of India, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, that was all under our charge. And I had men there all over. I traveled to some of those places. I never got to Singapore. I saw some of the others.
Ungemach: Where else did you go?
Chiocca: I stopped in Burma; I didn’t do much there, spent a few days in Siam, what’s now Thailand. That was one of our main places. And a few days in Vietnam in--. [taps table.] What’s the name of the city? I can’t even think of it. Not Hanoi, Hanoi was in the northern part. I can’t think of it. [Pause, thinking.] It was in Vietnam, it was French Indochina at that time.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And at that time, what I saw in Southeast Asia, that was the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, in Southeast Asia. It was gorgeous. Beautiful. French colonial style, very nice-looking.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: You felt it was civilization, whereas the other places--. Burma was very, very barren and backward. Burma we traveled in by jeep because we were stationed not too far from the border between India and Burma so we traveled there. The other places we had to fly in. And I never got to Singapore either. If the war had stayed on for a while, I would have gotten to all those places.
Ungemach: Mhm. You were taking down infrastructure.
Chiocca: Right.35
Ungemach: Gathering up all this equipment to do something with it.
Chiocca: Right. Equipment and men.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: One of the stations, as a matter of fact I think it was the station in Vietnam, I’m trying to think. I think it was Vietnam, we recalled them, everybody was coming back, the station commander was coming back, second lieutenant was a Chinese boy, a nice boy, and they were 20 minutes away from landing and the plane disappeared.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Never found it.
Ungemach: Jeez.
Chiocca: It went down in the water, everything. Never heard a word. We don’t know what happened. So we were closing everything and they were flying back.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: They left everything. They just came back with the men and the money. He was carrying the money that he had cause we all had money. We had to deal. It’s not like today where you deal on the Internet. You dealt with cash.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So you had money to pay for things.
Ungemach: Mhm. This was in exchange for what you were--?
Chiocca: When it was necessary, sometimes you needed something from the local market or if you needed to pay people, to do things, hiring help, to pay them.
Ungemach: Mhm. So you mentioned before that you ended up in Calcutta and that there were riots going on.36
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: In regards to--.
Chiocca: Yeah, that was on my way back, when I was finishing, yeah.
Ungemach: Do you know any more about what was happening then?
Chiocca: They were the skirmishes. This was the beginning of India’s desire to be free of the British and there were skirmishes. There were no big battles or anything, but you’d get the overnight skirmishing, of throwing bottles at people and some people being shot and killed. And we were just going to stay out of that; we didn’t want to be involved in somebody else’s problem. Cause the British were still there. So we were pretty well out. The only thing it meant was that we couldn’t get into the city or eat our food at a restaurant or something.
Ungemach: Was there any news about Gandhi, about what he was trying to do?
Chiocca: The Gandhi name was maybe out there, but to us it was just an uprising.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A general uprising rather than--. The big name was not Gandhi, the big name was the Uprising of the People.
Ungemach: OK. When you were packing up stuff, did you have contact with the British or with any other Allied--?
Chiocca: With the British.
Ungemach: With the British?
Chiocca: Yeah. And with the Indians to a certain small amount; I told you about that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Generally speaking we just left stuff. But with the British, yeah. Before we were packing up, even, I was with the British, in some meetings with them so they knew what we 37
were doing, just to keep them apprised. We pretty well did things on our own. We didn’t get support from the British; we didn’t ask for any. We just told them what we were doing.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Cause they would be staying there. We weren’t. We’d be leaving.
Ungemach: Mhm. Were there any African Americans in you contingent?
Chiocca: [thinking.] I can’t remember. I really can’t remember.
Mrs. Chiocca: It was at the time when they were segregated.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. I don’t think so.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Cause it was right after that that President Truman said, “No more segregated units.” There were blacks, but they were in their own units. And as far as the Air Force [Air Corps] was concerned, I know they had some pilots.
Mrs. Chiocca: [softly.] Tuskegee.
Mr. Chiocca: But I don’t remember any of them.
Ungemach: Mhm. So, was it just the officers who were on the planes out of--?
Chiocca: No, we had some enlisted men.
Ungemach: Enlisted men too?
Chiocca: Yeah, both. Yeah.
Ungemach: So it was by boat and by plane?
Chiocca: Well, it was 99.9% by boat.
Ungemach: By boat. OK.
Chiocca: The plane was just a cadre of the few people that were left. And the only thing we took on the plane was equipment to protect ourselves. If something went wrong and we had to get 38
down, we wanted replacement parts for some things and we probably wouldn’t have the right part anyway.
Ungemach: So then you ended up in Italy and [pause] then you said you got two weeks off in Switzerland before you had to go back down to Naples and--.
Chiocca: Right.
Ungemach: Before you got your other assignment.
Chiocca: So I went up to Rome and then I went up to Switzerland.
Ungemach: What did you do during the weeks in Switzerland?
Chiocca: What did I do what?
Ungemach: When you were in Switzerland?
Chiocca: Oh, we were on a tour! The military put on a tour. They actually had [laughs] tour guides and we got on a train and they took us to various places; we went up to the mountains. Just had trips around Switzerland. The city. We went to some of the cities. I don’t even remember. It was beautiful. And that was the lake area of Italy and Switzerland, that trip. And it was paid for by the government. I hadn’t had a day off in two years [laughs]. So, it was part of that. You were allowed a certain number of days and when you get into that kind of thing, they provide the wherewithal to give you some enjoyable time. So that’s what it was. Just having a good time.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then you went back to Naples and then got sent to Paris.
Chiocca: Paris, yeah. I think I had one or two trips to Rome for something as part of that trip. I don’t even remember. I went to Rome, but then we just flew up or jeeped up, I don’t remember. I know I went to Rome. But that was a day or two. Paris was three or four months.
Ungemach: Mhm. So you were basically just in charge of the men who were going to the--.39
Chiocca: School.
Ungemach: to the school.
Chiocca: Right. Because during the day they were being taught by the Army Signal Corps.
Ungemach: Mhm. Where were those men from?
Chiocca: From Naples.
Ungemach: Were they Italians or--?
Chiocca: Oh, no, no. These were American troops.
Ungemach: Who’d been in Naples?
Chiocca: Right. Who had been Naples, had come over. They were the new people who came in after the war because we weren’t getting out of Europe. We got out of India but we weren’t getting out of Europe. We had stations in Italy, we still do. We still have stations in Italy even today. So we had troops down there who needed more training to do the thing and the best place for it was where the Signal Corps had a school. They didn’t have any in Italy. See, at that time, our Air Corps was part of the army. So we had to go up to Paris to do that.
Ungemach: Paris.
Chiocca: Yeah. So, they were taught. I was there, I had an officer under me who ran things. They put you there mostly to take blame, so if something goes wrong you know who to blame.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That’s the game.
Ungemach: So were you doing anything else while you were in Paris along with--?
Chiocca: [Shakes his head no.]
Ungemach: Not really?40
Chiocca: I just was responsible for that school, for that schooling of the men. I just made sure they were there and they were fed and clothed and so forth and so on. Each day they were turned over to another unit to do the schooling.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So we were just holding their hands. Making sure they were there. And they weren’t about to leave! They were in a nice place! [laughs.]
Ungemach: Yeah. OK, then what did you do with your free time while you were in Paris?
Chiocca: I did a lot of sightseeing. Did a lot of sightseeing. And I learned quite a bit of French, how to use the subways, and got around very easily. So, it was good.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then, back to Italy briefly. Did you encounter any civilians in Italy?
Chiocca: Yeah, you encountered the civilians that are there to do housekeeping--. The armed forces always use local people to do a lot of things. And, of course, when I traveled, I met them, yes.
Ungemach: Mhm. What was their feeling about Americans being in--?
Chiocca: Oh, they loved it. They loved it. We were bringing in a lot of money. They had nothing left. The Nazis had stripped them completely. They had pulled the trolley cars out, taken the wires down to melt the copper wires, ripped up the rails for steel. So they were barren all over Italy, from north to south. So it was a rebuilding for them. They needed money and supplies to rebuild. I’m sure we poured a lot in.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I don’t know what the figures were but it was a lot. The other good thing about Naples rest and recuperation; they have some neat things, like I said about the trip through Switzerland. They had weekends, I think they were weekends, you could get a boat to the island of--.41
Mrs. Chiocca: Capri.
Mr. Chiocca: Capri.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And there was a long list of people waiting to go and I go up to sign up and there’s the sergeant who was running this, and he was one of my men from India.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I hadn’t seen him in a year. And that was that. I got a boat every weekend.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Every weekend I had a Saturday and Sunday in Capri.
Ungemach: That’s nice.
Chiocca: It worked well. I say every weekend; two, three, four weekends, I don’t remember what it was. But it was beautiful. Very nice. And it was free.
Ungemach: [laughs.] That’s nice. And then, when you came back from Paris, the major wanted you to go to Spain.
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: But that didn’t work out?
Chiocca: Yeah. I’m putting it very simply; there’s two parts of the army. One is the regular army and one is the army of people who come on during a war.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And never the twain shall meet. They’ve got their neat little ways of keeping them separate. So my commission and everything I earned was because of the war. Now the army was going to be taken over by West Pointers. And now you’re getting back to the routines. And they wanted me to drop back a grade to first lieutenant.42
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I said, “No. I’m a captain.” And I was a captain only as long as I stayed doing what I was doing. But to get back to something like that, they wanted to drop me to first lieutenant. And I said, “No. I won’t do it.” And we juggled that one around for a couple weeks and it couldn’t get done and I said, “Fine, I’m going home.”
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: [laughs.] They couldn’t stop me from going home at that point. So I went home. If they had agreed to leave me on as captain, with the possibility of being promoted more after that, I would have gone.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: It was a good opportunity, but I didn’t want to go back in rank.
Ungemach: Mhm. So you were going home in 1947 or thereabouts?
Chiocca: ’46.
Ungemach: ’46. So, what was it like going back home?
Chiocca: You mean the trip?
Ungemach: Well, the trip and the feeling of seeing--?
Chiocca: The trip was very routine, small ship, not the big thing that we were on with 5,000 troops on it and so forth. Very small ship. Thank goodness we didn’t run into rough weather or we would have felt it! [laughs.]
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: By the time I got back here, there was nobody to greet you anymore. The first group gets greeted, the second group, you’ve forgotten already.
Ungemach: Mhm.43
Chiocca: So I came back and signed all the papers and so forth and I was out.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Very simple. They asked me about continuing in the reserves and at first I didn’t know what to say. I said, “I don’t know, I’ll figure it out later.” So I didn’t resign or anything. So I was still kept on a reserve list. And that went on for a year or two and then finally I had to do something; either get involved and do something or I would be separated completely. And I decided I would continue with the reserves, which I did. And I continued until I had finished off 21 years in total.
Ungemach: Mhm. Had your brother been home before--?
Chiocca: Oh yes.
Ungemach: Yeah?
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: So how was--?
Chiocca: He had gone back to teaching school, back to his old job.
Ungemach: And how were your parents?
Chiocca: Well, my father had closed up the place and retired. They were elderly and I think they looked to me as being there to help them and so forth and so on. Until she came along [points at Mrs. Chiocca].
Ungemach: Mhm. Was it difficult to adjust to life when you came home?
Chiocca: No, not really. I took a job, which was selling, for the National Cash Register Company and six months later I realized I wasn’t really enjoying it. And I left to look for another job. Went on from there. I was in sales, I kept in sales, but was somewhere else. And I never went back to teaching. I had just experienced so many different things that the thought of 44
teaching no longer really appealed to me. I did go back to Montclair, I talked to my professor, he offered me a job as an instructor and the pay was always [laughs] so low that I said, “No. No thanks.” Or I could have gotten back into the realm of science and teaching and so forth, but I didn’t want to.
Ungemach: Mhm. [pause.] Had you, by that point, heard about the Holocaust? About what Hitler had been doing?
Chiocca: Oh gosh. Not while I was in Europe. I don’t remember when I first heard about it. I didn’t hear it when I was in Europe. I guess after that I did but I can’t remember when the first time was. [pause.] Nope, I don’t remember.
Ungemach: Mhm. [pause.]
Chiocca: Might have heard something, but not something major, not with the pictures that we’ve become accustomed to and all.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: I think that came later.
Ungemach: I think that’s about it. We’re at about an hour and 16 minutes, so--.
Mrs. Chiocca: Wow. I didn’t know you [Mr. Chiocca] could talk so much. I was listening to see if I missed anything over the last 56 years or 59 years.
Mr. Chiocca: No, I told you all of it.
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: It was an experience; some of it was good, some of it wasn’t so good, but it was an experience. Nobody ever shot at me. I was lucky from that angle.
Mrs. Chiocca: Well, if we didn’t go in the service, we probably wouldn’t have met again, wouldn’t have gotten married.45
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. I joined the American Legion and Doris was in the service also and that’s where we met.
Ungemach: Oh OK.
Mrs. Chiocca: But we lived in the same town all our lives, went to the same high school, he was a patient of the dentist I worked for, but we never met till after the war.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. I didn’t come home with a bride.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.] I didn’t come home with a husband either!
Mr. Chiocca: That was a sad, sad thing. When I was in Paris, I lived in a hotel.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: The troops had troop quarters but I lived in a hotel. And, somehow or other, that hotel became the place where some of the G.I.’s brides were brought in before being sent back to the U.S. The husbands might have been back in the U.S. but now they were bringing their brides back.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And I remember seeing these gals, most of them were gals from the countryside, they looked like they were the farmer’s daughter, with hay growing out of their ears and so forth. They were a sorry lot. Poor people. They had had a tough war. They didn’t have clothing right, they had suitcases that were not suitcases, they were carpetbags [laughs]. And their husbands were in the U.S. They had been brought back but now they were claiming their brides. Oh my gosh, seeing those people. It was sad. I wondered how they made out because once they landed in this country, it was so different than anything they’d ever seen.
Ungemach: Mhm.46
Mr. Chiocca: So different. Now that difference isn’t there. Now you get a country like France and they’re up on things the same as we are. We might not want to admit it, but they are. But then it was a lot different. I remember seeing those people--.
Mrs. Chiocca: You know you asked about African Americans in the service? Really, the only pilots were the Tuskegee [struggles.].
Mr. Chiocca: Tuskegee.
Mrs. Chiocca: Tuskegee pilots. They were a whole group.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: And when I was stationed down at--. When I went in, we were segregated just the white girls and that, no mixture at all.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: In fact, I was down in Georgia and they used to say, “Don’t be smart and sit in the back of the bus.”
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: Because blacks had to sit back there. And down there especially it was really segregated. Different.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. But little by little. The army held back, the Air Force, and it was the Air Corps first, was more lenient towards it. The Air Force was one of the first to use women in other than secretarial-type work. We had women in the control towers.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: That was unheard of. The army never did, or then it was the Air Corps. But they had women in the control towers. They had nurses and medical personnel, yes.
Mrs. Chiocca: WASPs too. The WASPs used to pilot--.47
Mr. Chiocca: They were not part of the military, the WASPs were not military.
Mrs. Chiocca: They weren’t in the military?
Mr. Chiocca: No. The WASPs were women who ferried planes from the manufacturer to airports or overseas and so forth. That’s what my brother was being trained for at one point.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: But they decided to cut off the men and use only women [laughs].
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And he landed in North Africa.
Mrs. Chiocca: See, when women went into service in World War II though, they went in to replace a soldier or that, to free him for active duty, so the women were really replacing a soldier so they could--. They didn’t go in to do any kind of combat like they’re doing now. It was a different attitude for them.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. And the blacks, whenever they were into something, they were in their own units, when you think of it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: When Harry Truman said, “Integrate,” then they became part of all the units, but before that they had black units.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And in Italy, the fighting when we went from North Africa up through Sicily and into Italy, it was blacks who carried the load of that fighting, in the infantry.
Ungemach: Mhm.48
Mrs. Chiocca: During World War II, about the Japanese; we had some Japanese-Americans in California that were put into camps and that.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: That was a hard thing. And yet, we had Japanese that were fighting in the service.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. It’s strange how you pigeon-hole people. We had brought Italian prisoners of war here, brought them in the U.S. so that we wouldn’t have to maintain them in prisons over in Europe. We had to send goods over to maintain the prisoners, so we just brought them over here. And Virginia had big camps of Italians. We had some here in New Jersey. And the people took to them. They used to take them home for Sunday dinner!
Ungemach: [laughs.] Jeez!
Mr. Chiocca: Well, in fairness, most of the Italian prisoners were not Nazis, were not Fascists. They were just put into the army because the government wanted them there. They were not in favor of what they were doing. So, they were not people that you’d be afraid of, whereas the German prisoners we had were very different. And when I was in the reserves, there was a captain in our unit who, I think he was a lawyer, and he was involved in interrogating the German prisoners of war to try to figure out who the real Nazis were. And he said that was really something because little by little, he could figure out who these Nazis were and they controlled the rest of the prisoners around them. Just like at gang prisons now. And he went out to figure out who these guys were and then they’d keep their eye on them. Even though they were a whole prisoner group, but there were prisoners that you kept an eye on. And they were the Nazis, so, of course, we didn’t like them. Unfortunately, we didn’t like any of the Germans. Even though the other guys were just carrying a gun because they had been told to carry a gun. [laughs.]49
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. But the Italians, for some reason or other, I know I heard about, they used to take them home for dinner on a Sunday. They let them leave the prison!
Ungemach: Jeez!
Mr. Chiocca: They didn’t want to go back to Italy. They wanted to stay here. [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: The Italians didn’t like to fight anybody.
Mr. Chiocca: That’s right. They weren’t fighters.
Mrs. Chiocca: It’s a long time ago.
Mr. Chiocca: When I was on that rest and recuperation thing and I went up to the northern part of Italy into Switzerland, I had an uncle who lived in Turin. And I went to see him. I knocked on his door.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: [slightly emotional.] It was really something. The Germans had stripped him, stripped him cold. They took everything.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Every piece of copper, everything. The building he lived in--. They had condominiums there; we didn’t know the word condominium.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: He owned two; he lived in one and he owned another one in another building, but we didn’t know that word. You didn’t own a piece of a building; we do now, but you didn’t then in the United States. And the big building he lived in had all the pock marks from the cannons that were hitting it. Big holes in the walls.
Ungemach: Jeez.50
Mr. Chiocca: Unbelievable. And the trolleys were all gone, they took them all, sent them back to Germany for melting. And Turin was a big manufacturing--. Fiat was Turin. And they stripped everything. So even the civilians were against the military part of it because they had a terrible time. Food was scarce.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: I can remember I had multi pieces of uniform that I had and I saw how bare everything was. And I took off the shirt and trousers; I made sure there wasn’t an insignia or anything, that they were all plain, and those things were well made. And I gave them to him and he cried.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: [slightly emotional.] To get something like that. He was stripped of everything. He had nothing. And he cried.
Ungemach: Was this your mother’s brother or you father’s?
Mr. Chiocca: My mother’s brother, yeah.
Ungemach: OK. Your family was originally from Italy?
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. My mother and father were from north Italy. They came here in the turn of the century. Before I was born. I was born here. It was a surprise. I walked in on him.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: The American people, we’ve never had anything happen in the United States, so we don’t know what it’s like to go through all that they did in Europe and that.
Ungemach: Yeah. Because it completely fell apart. Just everything was gone. They had to start over. 51
Mrs. Chiocca: That’s why the Twin Towers was such a big thing. Just think over there that every town, England too--.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: Strange things that happened come to mind. When I went up north I was on public transportation, a railroad car or something like that, and I was in uniform and I didn’t carry any--.
Mrs. Chiocca: Side arms.
Mr. Chiocca: Any arms, any side arms, no pistols, nothing. Now in Italy, if you were in uniform, if you were a policeman or anything, if you were street sweeping, you would carry firearms!
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And here I am in this railroad car and everybody looks upon me as a soldier; I was the only one. The rest of the Italians, they didn’t know that I could understand Italian. And they’re talking amongst themselves: “Look at this! Look at, here’s an officer; he doesn’t have any arms on him!”
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: “He doesn’t have a pistol on him!” It was strange because we carried arms when you were fighting, but other than that you didn’t. You never did. Never did.
Mrs. Chiocca: It’s changing there.
Mr. Chiocca: You got rid of them, put them back. But over there, everybody was armed.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: It’s getting like that in the United States.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. Course, they didn’t know I probably couldn’t have hit the side of a barn if I had arms on me.52
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: It was interesting that they thought that and that I was alone. Because, at that point, there was still a lot of in-fighting going on from the Fascists that were left with those who were against Fascism. 90% were against Fascism, but the 10% ruled. And these people were bad people. Bad people.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And so you still had those people around and they would be armed. The rest of the people weren’t. So they would look at me, unarmed, going around alone.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: We look at the good thing in people. They had to look always at the bad things. So, can I answer any more questions? Ungemach: No, I think that’s perfect actually.
Mr. Chiocca: More than you expected. I hope it gives you what you wanted.
Ungemach: Yes.
Mrs. Chiocca: He didn’t have anything exciting about him, like escaping from prison or --.
Ungemach: That’s OK. I’d never heard of American troops being sent to India so when I heard that over the phone I was all excited so--.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. It’s different. Yeah. And I look at this on the map and we were in the province of Assam, A-s-s-a-m. And I looked at it on a map and its right of the border of Bangladesh.
Ungemach: Mhm.53
Mr. Chiocca: Now, that was all India then. Now it’s Bangladesh. So we were on the Indian end of the border but we were close to Bangladesh, which is, as you know, the world’s poorest nation. . . . [tangent about poverty in Bangladesh.] And here was Calcutta, biggest city in India. You don’t even hear about it anymore. It’s so far down in the dregs. . . . [returns to Bangladesh.] So that’s where we were stationed [Bangladesh], in that area. Near there; we were in the mountains. There were no towns nearby; a couple of shacks. There’s always a restaurant.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Always a restaurant. And they could serve Chinese food or something; they could always sell you a couple of fried eggs. That was the other thing; walk in, “I’ll have some eggs.” Cause we always had plenty of meat. The U.S. army eats a lot of meat. So they’ll give it to you one way or another, but they always give you a lot of meat.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: But eggs, no; we couldn’t get eggs. And sometimes we’d just have a K ration. A package to eat. And other times, and we always kidded about it too; there’s the regular troops and then there’s the elite and we were just troops out doing the job, getting these goods over into China.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: But we had a lot of people over from the Strategic Air Command with General, what was his name? He was chief of the Air Force. Lame [pronounced le-may]! They were his people; it was the air force that he had there for bombing Japan. Well, those people had steak,
Ungemach: [laughs.]54
Mr. Chiocca: They had ice cream. We would learn about it, but we never got any of it. So you had the elite of those pilots compared to those grunts that we had who were just moving goods into China for fighting a war. We didn’t get that.
Mrs. Chiocca: That’s every war. . . . [Tangent about George Washington in the Ford’s Mansion in Morristown, NJ.]
Mr. Chiocca: OK. We’ll let you go back to some important stuff.
Ungemach: [laughs.] Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Mr. Chiocca: You’re welcome.
--------End of first interview--------
[After finishing the transcript, I called Mr. Chiocca on Sunday, November 1, 2009 to clarify a few points and ask some of the questions I forgot during the main interview. I had my cell phone on speaker phone in order to record the phone call. The batteries in my recorder died after 5 minutes, so those initial minutes were lost and had to be redone. I had sent my list of questions to Mr. Chiocca via my parents beforehand so that he would have a chance to remember names and such. ]
Lisa Ungemach: How much older is your brother than you?
Mr. Chiocca: Ten years.
Ungemach: Ten years. OK. And what were your parents’ names?
Chiocca: Felix, F-e-l-i-x, and my mother was Enrichetta, E-n-r-i-c-h-e-t-t-a.
Ungemach: And her last name?
Chiocca: Boltri, B-o-l-t-r-i.
Ungemach: OK. Did you speak Italian as well as English at home?
Chiocca: Yes. Yes. As well as a dialect, a local dialect. 55
Ungemach: From where they were from in Italy?
Chiocca: Right. Which is incomprehensible as Italian [laughs]. So different.
Ungemach: Yeah. You said that after you finished your degree but before you went into service, you worked in a shipyard. Where was the shipyard?
Chiocca: It was in Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Hudson River.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And it was Bethlehem Steel.
Ungemach: OK. What were you doing there?
Chiocca: I was an electrician’s helper.
Ungemach: OK. What was the name of the captain you’d worked under in Florida and Langley Field and who met you at the dock in India?
Chiocca: That was Levenson, L-e-v-e-n-s-o-n.
Ungemach: OK. Were you working under him the entire time you were there?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No.
Chiocca: In India, he was at a different level. We were in the squadron level, he was in the troop level. So we saw each other, lived nearby, but we did not work together.
Ungemach: OK. The airport you were working in by the mountains was built just for the war, right?
Chiocca: Yes, that’s correct.
Ungemach: What was it called?
Chiocca: Chabua. It’s the name of the local town. C-h-a-b-u-a.
Ungemach: OK. And it was already built by the time you arrived?56
Chiocca: Oh yes.
Ungemach: OK. What was the name of the Indian civilian you hired as your--?
Chiocca: I can’t recall.
Ungemach: OK. When everything was getting closed down in India, you said there was a major who was shipped out before you were when you were left in charge of things. So, he wasn’t the same captain who had met you when you arrived, correct?
Chiocca: That is correct.
Ungemach: What was his name/
Chiocca: Major Ruth. His name was R-u-t-h. I don’t remember his first name.
Ungemach: OK. Then, again, when everything was getting closed down, I think you said something to the effect of having met a general in charge of the theater. What was his name? What was he doing?
Chiocca: Well, there was, of course, a general in charge of the Indian theater.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: The general that was in charge of the Air Corps part of it, the person--. Oh, I can’t think of his name. [laughs.] I can relate to him in this way: he was the person who came up with the idea of how to get the shipments over the mountains into China.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And he made it work. This is just part of history though. Later on, if you remember history, after World War II was over, we got into a little hassle with the Russians and they tried to cut us off from Berlin.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Remember that--?57
Ungemach: Yes.
Chiocca: Environment? We were able to keep the people of Berlin alive by flying in food and coal to keep them warm the entire winter. We broke the back of the blockade put on by the Russians.
Ungemach: Yep.
Chiocca: The general they called in to do that job was the same general who came up with the idea in India.
Ungemach: Oh OK!
Chiocca: Before they got him to the Berlin Lift, we were losing.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: We were not going to be able to do it. But that general was the one who got us out of trouble in the Berlin airlift. Unfortunately, I can’t think of his name.
Ungemach: OK. The major that called you down to Naples after you’d landed in Rome--. He was you’re overseer while you had been in India, correct?
Chiocca: This is correct. He was a lieutenant colonel, not a major.
Ungemach: Oh OK. What was his name?
Chiocca: I can’t think of his name, either.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: I’ve been trying but I can’t think of it.
Ungemach: OK. What was the name of the Army Signal Corps [school] that you were taking the men to in Paris?
Chiocca: [thinking] I can’t remember the name of it. Army Signal Corps Communication Training School--. That’s about all I can think of Lisa.58
Ungemach: OK. You mentioned that when you were in India, there wasn’t much trade of cigarettes and the liquor or beer rations going on, so you gave most of your things away.
Chiocca: Right.
Ungemach: You said that later on, when you were no longer in India, that changed. So, was that when you were in Italy and Paris?
Chiocca: Yes. Mainly in Italy.
Ungemach: Mainly in Italy. OK. What changed? What was different?
Chiocca: Well, in India, there was nobody to buy--. The Indian people were so poor that they weren’t spending money on cigarettes or liquor. They needed to get the basics to live on.
Ungemach: Right.
Chiocca: In Italy, it was completely different. While they’d been though a war, there were people who wanted some things and had means to pay for them. So it was very easy. We didn’t trade much; you just sold the cigarettes to whoever wanted them in Italy. I don’t remember anything about liquor in India. I just can’t remember that. I remember selling the cigarettes; I didn’t smoke so it was easy to get rid of it. And you got cash for them.
Ungemach: OK. Was it any easier to communicate with your family when you were in Italy and Paris then it had been when you were in India?
Chiocca: No, the same. The United States Postal Service, the military postal service, was the same.
Ungemach: OK. You said when you were closing up stations in the eastern half of India and then in Burma and Vietnam, etc. we couldn’t remember the name of the city in Vietnam you visited. Was that Saigon?59
Chiocca: Yes. Yes, it was. It was a beautiful, old, French colonial city with gorgeous buildings and trees and boulevards everything else at that time. It had been pretty hard messed up by the war, so it was different.
Ungemach: Yeah. You were talking about dealing with money in order to pay people for things and such in India. Was it dollars or was it Indian currency?
Chiocca: We got paid in dollars. And, generally speaking, in a place like we were, we sent most of the money home. You got paid and you sent it back home again. You kept a few dollars which you could change into the local rupee mark so that if you were out buying something or having food in a restaurant or something, you would use the rupees.
Ungemach: OK. One last question. Do you know the name of the sergeant who’d been with you in India who gave you the weekend trips on the boat to Capri?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No.
Chiocca: No, I can’t remember his name at all. [laughs]
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: I did give your mother a copy of a letter I had sent to one of my old--. Well, not my old, just somebody who had been in Chabua with us. This was many years ago. He was on the west coast and he had dropped me a letter and I sent him a letter. He asked me for an update and I sent him a letter. So I gave her a copy of that; there’s a lot of the things that were going on in India.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: I think she probably will transmit that to you.
Ungemach: Yes, I think I got that in an e-mail. [See Appendix 2]60
Chiocca: OK. Just some extra background and if you can find use for it, fine.
Ungemach: OK. I think that’s all my questions.
Chiocca: Oh, good. [laughs]
Ungemach: Yeah. The transcript is around 56 pages long right now so--.
Chiocca: So you’ve got to bring that down somewhat?
Ungemach: No! Oh, no. It’s meant to be that long. [laughs]
Chiocca: You mean I talked longer than I should have?
Ungemach: Oh no! No. The interview was meant to be an hour and a half. . . . So, after I make whatever changes I need to, I can send you a copy of it and of the interview, the recording.
Chiocca: OK. Good. Well, if you have any other questions, give me a call.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: And I hope it goes well for you.
Ungemach: Yes. Thank you very much.
Chiocca: OK. Goodbye now.
Ungemach: Goodbye!Reflection on Experience
Part of the reason I love history so much is hearing about a person’s quirks or the odd coincidences that occur in everyday life. Even the “great white men” of our nation’s history have funny stories that make them more human in the telling. This interview gave me a new perspective on life during the Depression and World War II and I was given an opportunity to hear some of those stories.
I decided I was going to do my interview while I was at home over Reading Days. When I heard what the assignment was, I wished that my grandfather was still alive so I could have heard his story. I originally planned to interview my grandmother but had to change my plans when I discovered that she was not old enough. My parents then recommended that I interview Mr. D’Agati, a friend of my grandparents who had war experience. When I called him, he told me that he and his wife would be away that weekend. Mr. D’Agati suggested I try Mr. John Chiocca, another neighbor he said would be a good choice because of his clear memory and gregarious nature. I did not know Mr. Chiocca, but I had spent some time with two of his grandchildren, who are around my age, and Mr. D’Agati was so insistent that I decided to give Mr. Chiocca a call. He said he was available that Saturday (October 10) and would love to help out any way he could. The preliminary interview went very well and I knew I would have an interesting conversation with Mr. Chiocca because his experience was like none I had ever heard before: he graduated from college before going overseas and was stationed in India and Italy at the end of the war. I really needed to do some research before Saturday.
When I began researching the war in India, I gathered a host of new information. I learned about the Hump (slang for the Himalayan Mountains) and the shipments pilots were flying over to China to bolster their efforts against Japan. The war also played a role in India’s push for independence from Britain. Italy suffered a great deal during the fighting in Europe and I was interested to discover what it looked like by war’s end.
Nervous and excited, I arrived at the Chiocca’s home at 2 PM on Saturday afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca were very welcoming and we decided to conduct the interview at the kitchen table. Mrs. Chiocca sat with us and was very helpful at certain points. She had some fascinating insights to add towards the end and I think someone needs to take the time to hear her war story as well. I was suffering from a cold and sore throat, so I was not at my best, but I was very lucky in my interviewee. Mr. John Chiocca anticipated some of my questions and needed very little prompting to expand on a point or elaborate a story. His recollections were by turns serious and funny and his memory was impeccable; except for a few instances where dates or names escaped him, Mr. Chiocca was able to answer every one of my questions and told some fascinating anecdotes.
To further demonstrate the essence of Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca: I returned to their home the following day with flowers to say thank you to them both. Mrs. Chiocca opened the door, saw the flowers, and then said, “John! Your girlfriend brought flowers for you!”
The interview also confirmed some of the pointers we had been given about this kind of interview. Date-specific questions tend to foul people up and interrupt the flow of the story. Yes or no questions are very unhelpful, but if asked in an open-ended manner, they trigger memories and yield an incredible amount of information. It is essential to come with some questions prepared, which is why the preliminary interview and subsequent research were so important, but the interviewer must always be prepared to think on their feet, since it is impossible to ascertain where the interview is going to lead beforehand.Typing the transcription was an unusual experience. My tape recorder is digital, which allowed me to transfer the interview to my computer and listen to it in Windows Media Player. I copied the interview into a word document in stages and found that, while tedious, the actual process of transcribing was not very difficult. I was able to remember expressions and gestures Mr. Chiocca used and, in the several instances where Mrs. Chiocca spoke softly or at the same time as Mr. Chiocca, I could remember and understand what she had said. Listening to the interview was a fun experience because of Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca’s personalities and I am very glad that I have some of their recollections recorded.
After completing the transcript and listening to it to ensure I had not missed anything, I created a list of questions that I had forgotten to ask Mr. Chiocca in the first interview. Since most of them referred to names, I decided I would send them to him beforehand so that he would have an opportunity to remember some of them. As I had also forgotten to take a current picture or ask for a war-time one, I e-mailed the questions to my parents and they delivered them and took the pictures. When looking for some of the names, Mr. Chiocca had found a letter he had written to a man on the west coast who had served in the same Indian town. My parents copied it, along with two war-time pictures and several present ones, and sent them back to me. The letter is included after the pictures and is much more technical and specific.
This experience was an excellent introduction to oral histories and I feel prepared to have another conversation with someone else. I also learned more about the Depression and World War II and I hope to have the opportunity to gather more such stories in the future. Appendix 1
Mr. Chiocca’s official picture Mr. Chiocca in India
Mr. Chiocca now Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca nowAppendix 2

Oral History Collection
To read the transcript and listen to the audio/video of this interview at the same time,
first download the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the
top of this screen. The transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select
the or option to the right of the screen.
Special Collections
Musselman Library
Interview with
John Chiocca
Interviewer: Elizabeth Ungemach
Interview Date: October 10 and November 1, 2009 Interviewee: Mr. John Chiocca
Interviewer: Elizabeth (Lisa) Ungemach
Date Interview Conducted: Saturday, October 10, 2009 and Sunday, November 1, 2009
CONTENT
Interview Subject’s Date of Birth: May 28, 1921
Home Town: Union City, NJ (grew up there; currently resides in Wayne, NJ)
Schooling during WWII: Degree in Engineering from Montclair State University
Date of Entrance into Service: enlisted August 5, 1942, no service until after college graduation
Job in Military Life: Communications officer in India
Important Experiences or Facts about the Interview Subject: His parents were from Italy and when he spent some time there he witnessed the conditions his mother’s brother was living in there; Enlisted in 1942 but didn’t start training until after college graduation in 1943; was in charge of men in the control tower of an Indian airport that was shipping goods over the Himalayan Mountains to China to aid that front of the war; and when he was scheduled to fly home after closing down operations in India, he was sent to Paris to oversee a group of men who were attending the Signal Corps school there.1
[This interview took place in the home of Mr. and Mrs. John and Doris Chiocca at 79 Mohawk Trail, Wayne, NJ on Saturday, October 10, 2009. I was interviewing Mr. Chiocca about his life with a specific focus on his World War II experiences. Mrs. Chiocca joined us at the kitchen table and added some interesting pieces of information and commented occasionally.]
Lisa Ungemach: Before we start talking about the war itself, we’re asked to get a general background of your life beforehand.
John Chiocca: Mhm. OK.
Ungemach: So, where were you born?
Chiocca: Born in Union City, New Jersey.
Ungemach: How big is your family?
Chiocca: We have four children, six grandchildren.
Mrs. Chiocca: You mean our family or his [points to Mr. Chiocca]?
Ungemach: No, I mean--.
Chiocca: You mean my family?
Ungemach: Yes, your siblings.
Chiocca: Oh, I just had one brother.
Ungemach: One brother. Was he older or younger?
Chiocca: Older.
Ungemach: Older. What was his name?
Chiocca: Pardon me?
Ungemach: What was his name?
Chiocca: Elso. E-l-s-o.
Ungemach: OK. And what did your parents do? What did your father do for a living?2
Chiocca: My father had a grocery store.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: And operated a grocery store.
Ungemach: Did you guys have a car?
Chiocca: Yes. When I went to college, I commuted, and my father bought a car for me to do that.
Ungemach: What kind of car was it?
Chiocca: I made the car pay for itself. Well, it was a hand-me-down. He had bought the car for my brother, who went to college also. That was about the second car but he bought that one new and then it was handed to me. It was a Ford V8 and we ran it until we couldn’t run it anymore and I made it pay for itself because I used to pick up students and take them to school and they paid me a weekly stipend for doing that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So the car paid for itself.
Ungemach: This was during college?
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: Yes. OK. And then, when you were growing up, did you listen to the radio a lot?
Chiocca: I don’t think it was a lot.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I don’t think we had it on a lot of the times. You did specifically put it on for certain things whether it was news or some entertainment.
Ungemach: Mhm
Chiocca: But not a lot. No. 3
Ungemach: Do you remember listening to President Roosevelt over the radio?
Chiocca: Yes. He was a spellbinder.
Ungemach: Yeah. His fireside chats.
Chiocca: Yeah. An older version of our present president.
Ungemach: So, when you were growing up, what did you and your brother do for fun?
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: My brother was into more athletics than I was. In the school itself. Although athletics in school were not anywhere near what they are today. I always tell the story that we had, in high school, one coach. And he coached everything, every sport, except tennis and something else and one of the other teachers did that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Every sport. One coach.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: What did we do for entertainment? We went to the movies once in a while and as I got older we went bowling.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: We played in the street a lot.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. Street ball. Lot of street ball. We lived in the city and you played in the street. Didn’t have as many cars then.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: So, elementary and middle school. You went to local public school or--?4
Chiocca: Public school. Elementary, which was considered through the eighth grade; there were no middle schools then. And then you went to high school.
Ungemach: OK. And did you enjoy school?
Chiocca: I did. I enjoyed learning. I always was one who enjoyed learning. So I learned.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But I don’t think we did anything near the amount of work that kids do now. When we got home, pretty much was play time.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So our studying was done in school.
Ungemach: What were your favorite subjects?
Chiocca: In high school, probably the sciences, the various science subjects and math. I took French as a language and I enjoyed French very much. Those were about it.
Ungemach: Did you have any dreams of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No?
Chiocca: No, no. I think our main focus on that time was how do I make a living?
Ungemach: Yeah. Because of the Depression and--.
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: So you went to school at Montclair State University?
Chiocca: Yep.
Ungemach: Yes. And why did you decide to attend Montclair?5
Chiocca: I think because my brother had been through it and the price was right. I really, I focused on the fact that I thought that I’d like to into an engineering school and I was looking at Penn State.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But the tuition was much, much greater than my family could afford. Whereas Montclair State, at that time, I think was $50 a semester.
Ungemach: Wow.
Chiocca: It was either 50 a semester or a year, I don’t remember which. But it was in that range.
Ungemach: Jeez.
Chiocca: So it was relatively easy to achieve it.
Ungemach: And so you decided when you were looking at schools that you wanted to study engineering?
Chiocca: Well, when I got into Montclair, it was strictly in the sciences. That was my major. And a minor in math.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I always liked those. So, if I had gone out teaching, it would have been in those fields, yes.
Ungemach: Mhm. When did you first start, I guess, segueing into the war years, 1937, when did you first start hearing about fighting going on in Europe?
Chiocca: Well, of course, the date we remember was September ’39, I think it was September ’39 when the Nazis invaded Poland. However, before that, the, and I would say, two, three, four, five years before that, we could see the build-up in there. And Mussolini had decided to take Italy into Africa and took some African nations. And nobody could hold him back. 6
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: And then Hitler pulled his-- so it was somewhere in that time period.
Ungemach: Was there any--?
Chiocca: ’37, ’38, ’39.
Ungemach: Anything about Russia at that point?
Chiocca: No, not really.
Ungemach: Not really?
Chiocca: Nope.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then how closely did you follow news--?
Chiocca: Daily newspapers. That was most of it. And in those days the up-to-the-minute news was the newsboy would come around, yelling “Extra, extra!” And you’d run out of the house and buy an extra. In the middle of the day. When there was something to report that you didn’t want to wait till the next day.
Ungemach: So, when Hitler started coming to power, what was the general feeling about him? What did you think about what he was doing?
Chiocca: I think most people thought he was a nasty person and that there were a lot of problems, but that they were European problems.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: It wasn’t our problem.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: At the beginning.
Ungemach: And then he, I think it was in the late 1930s how he had originally had an agreement with Stalin but then he reneged on that.7
Chiocca: Right.
Ungemach: Just sort of a continuation of this negative feeling about him.
Chiocca: Right. Yeah.
Ungemach: And then the same thing with Mussolini in Italy?
Chiocca: Yes, yeah. And we, as a country, I think we had a very neutral but not really neutral; we disfavored those people, but it was hands off.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We believed that we shouldn’t get involved. As a nation.
Ungemach: Was there any particular, why was that feeling--?
Chiocca: I think it was just the feeling we had after World War I. It just carried though. That we wouldn’t get ourselves involved in another--, we felt it was one of those typical uprisings that happens between countries in Europe. Historically.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: And we were not going to get involved. Most of us were of that feeling.
Ungemach: So then the US started putting in place programs like Lend-Lease. So what was your feeling about that, about those kinds of programs?
Chiocca: I think that people agreed with it at that point. We were, we felt we weren’t involved but we were helping a nation that we felt was right, which was England, and Lend-Lease fit the bill and I don’t think that there were objections to Lend-Lease. It was acceptable.
Ungemach: Was there ever a point when you thought that the US would have to become involved in the war before Pearl Harbor?
Chiocca: I think there was a minority that felt that, but I think probably most people felt that we could steer clear of it. 8
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: There was still that feeling that it’s their problem, not ours; and help to England, yes, but that we would be physically involved in it? I thought that we were not going to do it.
Ungemach: OK. So you were in Montclair State, you were a sophomore or a junior when Pearl Harbor happened?
Chiocca: In ’41 yes, I was a junior. [thinking] I’m trying to think. In ’41, that was the end of sophomore year, beginning of junior year, just the beginning of junior year.
Ungemach: OK. So what were thoughts about--?
Chiocca: Well, things changed dramatically. Overnight. Overnight. It no longer was something that we felt that maybe Roosevelt was being a little bit too--, sticking his nose into things, up until that point, but we would stay out of it. But once Pearl Harbor happened then immediately, immediately, the whole country just changed right away.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And knew that we were involved, would be involved, and that we’d get into it. It changed completely.
Ungemach: Because it was so shocking.
Chiocca: Right. We did not expect that. Did not expect that.
Ungemach: So did your brother join any of the forces?
Chiocca: Not at that point. I don’t remember. He was teaching school, and he was teaching high school at the time; no, and he was out of it, and the first thing he did was--. There was a need for teachers at the University of Illinois, I think it was, where they had a contract with the federal government to teach the soldiers, I think, that were attached to the Air Corps at that time, mathematics and the subjects necessary to do that, so he left the school job that he had and went 9
out to the University of Illinois and was teaching military personnel that needed background that they needed to accomplish their goals, which was basically mathematics that he was working on at that time.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then how else was, before you entered the service, how else was your family involved in the war effort?
Chiocca: My mother and father weren’t. They stayed home and operated the store and they could see things changing. Foods became less plentiful, things were in short supply, prices started to go up.
Ungemach: How did they deal with that? In the store?
Chiocca: I don’t think there was anything different doing, they just put up with whatever it was.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Rationing came along and everybody was allowed certain poundage of butter per month and certain sugar, so my father had to get the coupons that they were issued and keep them so that they could turn them into the wholesalers to get that supply. So, it became paperwork and he couldn’t order more than he was allowed, so everybody was cutting back. So it was something that you sort of worked into naturally and put up with it. Everybody did it.
Ungemach: Became a part of life.
Chiocca: Yep. Yeah.
Ungemach: OK. What influenced your decision to stay in school after 1941?
Chiocca: Well, I don’t remember the sequence because my brother was there, and then he was in the program for pilot training.
Ungemach: Mhm. 10
Chiocca: And he was too old for the military part of it, so they were teaching him and civilians to ferry the planes where they were needed from the factory and so forth and so on, and that--. I don’t remember the sequence. That got closed down by the government, and he was put into the army. I was in school, so we’re talking December of ’41, and pretty soon the students were signing up to go into the military. I decided that I would sign up and I was sworn in in August, August the 5th I think, of ’42.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: In other words, we’re talking about 6-8 months after Pearl Harbor, and I was instructed to stay in school. They saw what I was doing and they liked some of the subjects I was taking, so they wanted me to finish the subjects.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I had the math, I was doing math. I had some photography courses in the developing-- not only just taking pictures but what photography was then. And they ultimately suggested that I stay in school. And that was again in August of ’42, about 6 months after Pearl Harbor, or 7 months after Pearl Harbor. And that went on for quite a while and I kept asking about my plans, what was going to happen. I should say, in the mean time, the college, realizing what went on, put everything on a very sped up basis.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We no longer were two semesters a year or anything [laughs]. We went 6 days a week and we went nights and so forth and we were able to complete our courses much earlier. And the Air Corps that I was signed up in was watching these developments and at first they told me they wanted me to get into meteorology.
Ungemach: Mhm. 11
Chiocca: So with that they demanded again that I take the certain courses and so forth and so on, which is what I had expected would happen. And this went on and on and on and on and I’d keep checking on and they just wanted me to keep taking those courses [laughs]. I guess they felt it was better if I took them before I went in and then they wouldn’t have to give them to me.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: To make a long story short, they apparently had enough meteorologists and then they decided that they would put me into photography and I was supposed to go out to one of the military things in [thinking] in Colorado, Colorado for photography. And that was again, just kept putting off and putting off, and final word came that they didn’t need me anymore in that, and the meteorology had been put out. I didn’t have calculus. I had gone for the courses that involved navigation, celestial navigation and all that sort of stuff, spherical trigonometry, did all of that. I didn’t take the one thing that they wanted. So it ended up that, in August, this is a year later, in August of [thinking] 40--.
Ungemach: 3?
Chiocca: ’44 then.
Mrs. Chiocca: ’43.
Chiocca: I started in ’42, so it was August of ’43. They decided that they wanted me in communications. It was strange [laughs]. And that’s when they gave me a railroad ticket and said get to Florida and I went to officer training school in Florida.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So you see how long they put off--.
Ungemach: Yeah. 12
Chiocca: Here’s a wartime. And I’d gotten a degree by then and as a matter of fact I’d gotten a degree before they called me. I actually went to work in the shipyard! I was working in the shipyard when they finally called me up! [laughs]
Ungemach: So, because of the sped up classes, you were finished with college before 1943?
Chiocca: I was finished in early ’43, in January of ’43.
Ungemach: So you were--?
Chiocca: I was ready.
Ungemach: You tried to enlist in ’42--.
Chiocca: Oh, I had enlisted, I swore in, I was a member of the military! [laughs.] That’s what is strange, strange thing!
Ungemach: They kept changing what they wanted you to do.
Chiocca: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Ungemach: Just back, for a second, you said your brother was ferrying--?
Chiocca: He was supposed to ferry planes, and that changed and they put him into the Army Air Corps, sent him to North Africa, and he was a load master on freight shipments through the air, so he was in the military.
Ungemach: OK. And then you were in officer training in Florida?
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: Where in Florida was that?
Chiocca: Boca Raton.
Ungemach: Ok. And what did that involve?
Chiocca: Mainly basic military and geared toward the leadership of officers with the basic stuff.
Ungemach: OK. 13
Chiocca: And then from Florida we were sent to North Carolina, where it became more the outdoor military things, camps and all that sort of outdoor stuff.
Ungemach: Where in North Carolina?
Chiocca: Goldsborough. Middle of North Carolina. That was started in August in Florida and somewhere late [thinking] September, August-September, somewhere around early October I was in North Carolina and then a month or two after that training I was sent to Yale University for communications training. So I was in Yale by November of that year. So it was August to November for just basic officer training and then specifically for communications training in Yale University.
Ungemach: OK. Why did they decide on Yale?
Chiocca: They had their big school there for this purpose set up by the Army Air Corps. They took over parts of these universities. We were not mixed in with the regular curriculum of Yale. We were there for a particular curriculum that the Army Air Corps wanted.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And we would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, they’d feed us, and then we did gymnastics or physical training until noon. That was half the day. And then we’d eat and then we’d go to classes. And they a figured out a way that you couldn’t fall asleep in classes: we had no desks. You had to stand up.
Ungemach: [laughs.] Wow.
Chiocca: You stood up, no sitting down. You stood up for the entire afternoon. Never had a break. They just kept batting you with all this information. And then you were given dinner at 5 or 6 o’clock, somewhere in there, and then you went back to your room and you studied. And lights out was at 11 and we’d get under the blankets with a flashlight and keep studying because 14
they’d kick you out. If you didn’t keep up with the curriculum, you’d get kicked out very quickly. So we’d study till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and then you got up again at 5:30 or 6 and went through it all.
Ungemach: Jeez. What kind of things were they teaching you in communications?
Chiocca: The basics of radio communications, starting with the basis of the code and so forth and how to send code by hand, which we had a minimal experience because we weren’t expected to do it but they taught us how to do it so that we would know when other people--.We’re going back to basics now. You actually had a key and with keying, the message is to someone else and, since this was for the Air Corps, it mainly was communications either within the system of any such if necessary but mostly for arrivals and departures from take-off to landing and then we operated the control tower and controlled the airport itself.
Ungemach: Where was this?
Chiocca: Anywhere.
Ungemach: Anywhere.
Chiocca: Anywhere. Later on I got to do Newark Airport, but any airport. The Air Force [Corps] controlled everything after that. Foreign and so forth and so on. Now some of the major airports still had some FAA people, Federal Administration people, doing the traffic control, but something, like Newark or LaGuardia and so forth, had so much traffic that they kept it. Most of the other smaller airports were all run by the Air Force, or the Air Corps at that time. So we did that from a school standpoint until I graduated in April of ’44 and my first assignment was to Virginia at Langley Field.
Ungemach: Mhm.15
Chiocca: Then you got training, not from a school angle, but from--. You were actually assigned a job but it was under somebody else. They weren’t going to let you do all these things until you really knew what it was about. So I spent time in the tower, because we were controlling the airplanes. I spent time with the people who sent messages on whatever-- We didn’t send administrative messages, that was left to the army, but it was messages that had to do with transporting or moving aircraft and so forth.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That type of thing. And finally, the most important part, especially at Newark, we were concerned with the landing systems. We were learning at that time how to land the plane in bad weather, cause up until then airplanes flew in good weather, not in bad weather. But the war changed all of that and we had to land in bad weather. Radar came on at the end of the time, but before that we had equipment that could land planes, even though the pilot couldn’t see anything.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So that was one of the main things we did. In my first assignment after Langley was in Newark Airport and I was in charge of the people who actually did the set-up and installed the equipment and trained the people how to use it so that you could land the planes in bad weather. And that’s what they were doing back then. And the military was doing all of it because civilians had no abilities in that, this was all brand new. And then radar came in at the end of that.
Ungemach: Mhm. So, you went from Yale to Langley to Newark and then, when did you end up overseas?
Chiocca: OK, I was at Newark not too long, some months, and then I got my overseas notice and that was a slow go. They put me on a train to Texas and there was a week or two in Texas where they got you ready for overseas and then they shipped you to California where you waited 16
another week to get on a boat, a ship, and then they shipped me out to the Pacific and we didn’t-- No one knew where we were going.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And we were onboard the ship over 30 days and we finally figured out we’re crossing the equator, so we weren’t going to Japan or anything and we ended up going around the bottom of Australia and went into India.
Ungemach: Mhm. So, you just got on a ship and you were getting shipped off somewhere, you didn’t know where?
Chiocca: [shakes head] No idea.
Ungemach: Wow.
Chiocca: Never knew. We didn’t know we were going to India until we got to the port and we knew we were in India. Nobody told us where we were going.
Mrs. Chiocca: Now, in that time, we used to say, “Loose lips sink ships.”
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: Not like it is now.
Mr. Chiocca: We couldn’t sink the ship, we didn’t know where we were going! Oh, the reason it took so long, by the way, some movements were done by convoys that were protected by submarines and other naval vessels. And then they had some of the newer ships, like the one that I was on, which was a troop carrier, and it was made to go faster and it had no convoy. We had no protection of anybody else.
Ungemach: Mhm.17
Chiocca: And what they did was they zigzagged all across the Pacific so that the submarines couldn’t get a beat on what you were doing because they kept changing the route we went. We went south of Australia and back the other way, so that’s why it took so long. Not because it was a slow ship, but we were on the water a long time.
Ungemach: What were you doing on the ship, to occupy yourselves?
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t a magazine to read, there was no program, there was no radio, nothing. Nothing.
Mrs. Chiocca: [softly] Tell her how you slept.
Mr. Chiocca: They got you up at 5 o’clock in the morning to do nothing
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: And they fed you.
Mrs. Chiocca: Slops.
Mr. Chiocca: Frankfurters and baked beans for breakfast, they gave you the necessary [laughs, ironic] energy, and then sometimes I think we got a little sandwich in between, and then we would get a dinner about 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: Tell her how you slept.
Mr. Chiocca: What’s that?
Mrs. Chiocca: How you slept.
Mr. Chiocca: Oh, slept. Well, we were lucky, we were officers, so we were only 3 high; the enlisted men were 4 deep.
Ungemach: Wow.18
Chiocca: We had to sneak in and, it was layered. And we were also fortunate; they put us in what was the brig, the prison. They didn’t use it as a prison, but we could sleep in there, we had a little more elbow room than the other guys who were in these cavernous places with all these people. I forgot how many we had on board, but it was a huge number of people.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And it was so bad down below that some of us started to sleep on the deck; we got into warm waters and we’d sleep on the steel deck at night until the captain found out we were doing it and that ended that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And then our clothes got so stinky; there was no change of clothes or anything. The clothes got so stinky so we got the idea, somebody got a rope and we were living in fatigues at that time and they put a bunch of fatigues, and tied them to the rope, and threw them off the keel [possibly stern meant here] of the ship.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: So the propellers went around and they got washed in salt water.
Ungemach: Jeez.
Chiocca: Until the captain found out about that!
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: So, you learned to do things and some things you got away with. Some you didn’t. We had a lot of good times. They had an interesting thing happen. When we landed in Australia, we stopped at a couple of ports in Australia, and we dropped off some Canadian Air Force officers, who were a bunch of crybabies.
Ungemach: [laughs.]19
Chiocca: Didn’t seem to know that we were in a war. And we see coming on board these guys from Australia. They had long coats on and they were carrying valises. We went on board stupidly, [laughs.] we had backpacks, a rifle across our back, and stuff like that. And these came with nice valises. They came on board, we found out they had been in India, they were back in Australia, and now they were returning to India and they were prepared for it. They had their suitcases full of liquor.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: No clothes, just liquor. And they were good people.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A lot different than we expected. Very good.
Ungemach: Were there any other non-Americans on the ship?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: Just the few Canadians?
Chiocca: Just some Australians. Yeah. First Canadians, then Australians. That was it. Yeah.
Ungemach: What officer rank were you?
Chiocca: By then I was a second lieutenant and I had been upgraded to first lieutenant. I received the orders just before I’d gone shipboard. [laughs.]
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: No, it was just before, in Texas, just before I got to California, that I was upgraded to first lieutenant.
Ungemach: So after training school in Florida you were a second lieutenant?
Chiocca: Second Lieutenant. Then first lieutenant. Right.
Ungemach: OK. Did you know anything about the situation in India before you got there?20
Chiocca: Nope.
Ungemach: Nothing?
Chiocca: Well, only because I had a group of enlisted men who had done work in India to install the landing systems for the Air Corps. And they had come back to the United States and they were the people that were installing in Newark when I took over.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I was the only officer and the enlisted men were the ones with the real knowledge. I only had the supervisory knowledge, they had the real knowledge. And these people had been in India and some of them told me some things about India, but I never expected to go there. So that’s all I knew.
Ungemach: Where in India were you stationed?
Chiocca: Well, I landed in Calcutta and they moved us to a replacement depot, which means you stay there until your orders give you where you’re going to go. It just so happened that one of my superior officers when I was in Florida and Langley Field, and I’d lost track of him completely, was in India.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I’m getting off the ship and there he is on the dock, waiting for me. And I couldn’t believe it. He was standing there and I says, “What’s going on?” And he says, “I’m waiting for you.” He knew that I was coming. And he was grabbing me for his unit.
Ungemach: What was his name?
Chiocca: [thinking] Oh, I’d have to think about it. He was a captain at that time, he was one grade above me. And he was stationed up in the northern parts of India, at the foothills of the Himalayas where I was then sent. And again, we went to this replacement depot but then they 21
shipped us out within a day or so. And that was an interesting trip. We were on railroad trains and the first time we got to a river, the train stopped, and they never tell you anything, we get off the train and they put us on boats that were somewhere between a canoe and a rowboat, made a little bit larger, and they had put some kind of a kicker on it to get us across the river. And we got on the other side of the river and there was a train waiting on the other side of the river.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We got back on that train and they did that about twice. And I learned, of course, what happened is that during the monsoon seasons, all the bridges get washed out and then until they can get new bridges built, which they do rather quickly from bamboo, they build bamboo and get railroad over it! And we were in that period of time when bridges were still not rebuilt, so they were ferrying us across to another train on the other side. And we eventually got up to this station right at the end of civilization just before the Himalayan Mountains into China, and found out what we were there for.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And that was the underbelly of the war where all the supplies were coming in and had to get over the Himalayas into China so that China could fight the Japanese. And that’s what we had to do. Nobody told us that’s where we were going, but that was it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That’s the first time I started doing something [laughs] that had a value rather than just training.
Ungemach: Or supervising.
Chiocca: So now were talking May of ’45. While we were on board the ship, Germany had surrendered, so we were still fighting the Japanese, but the war was over in Europe. 22
Ungemach: Oh OK. So you were in charge of getting supplies from--?
Chiocca: Actually, no, my training was with the communications people. So, we had people operating the control towers, in other words controlling the planes.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: We had other people operating the communications devices so that we could tell--. In other words, when a plane left, you had to report what time it was leaving and what time it would arrive at its destination, so you knew that it got there and you’d get back a message. So we were a messaging service, and the third thing we did, and the most important thing we did, was we installed and operated the guidance system that was able to get these planes over the mountains.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: In other words, how do you get the planes from point A to point B unless they’ve got some device? And we had devices that that they could contact and navigate their way over the mountains. And the joke was, they said on a clear day, you don’t need the device. All you’ve gotta do is look down and see all the planes that didn’t make it. Because the failure rate was very high.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A lot of planes didn’t make it. In wartime they just keep shoveling it over. So that was the thing. We were at that airport, moving huge quantities of goods into China to meet the Japanese from the other end.
Ungemach: So, by the time you’d arrived, Germany had surrendered.
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: Did you find that out when you got to India or had you heard about that while still on board the ship?23
Chiocca: I think we found out about it when we were still aboard the ship. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Ungemach: And what was sentiment about that?
Chiocca: Well, great! Now all the energy could go against Japan. And we had no idea that the end was coming so suddenly.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: Of course. Everybody thought that with the island hopping and the eventual invasion of Japan was the ultimate prize. The Japanese had not only China, but they had all of Southeast Asia. They had Indochina, Singapore and all, they had captured all of that, so it was a question of pushing them back.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And they did get pushed back and then we had control stations, radio stations and so forth, in Singapore and Vietnam and Siam then, and Burma, we had all those stations in there.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: All operated out of India.
Ungemach: OK. Just about life while you were stationed in India. Were you receiving rations or were you trying local fare?
Chiocca: Some of everything. Some of it was rations, a little bit was rations. We had mess halls so they tried to put things together. Some things we never got and we were on our own. We tried to buy some food. It’s amazing how you suddenly decide that some things that you took for granted you never see again. We never saw eggs and Americans love their eggs.
Ungemach: Yep.24
Chiocca: And usually we’d find some pilot who was going back from where we were in the Himalayas back to Calcutta and we’d all chip in $10 and ask him to buy eggs. And they’d bring up the eggs and we’d have some eggs to eat for a day or so. I remember one time we all chipped in and he came back and all the eggs were rotten. He couldn’t get off the ground fast enough, he was held up and in the heat they just went bad. So we were kind of downhearted. [laughs.]
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Some of the rations, they were able to do pretty well with. Sometimes we had very little to eat, but you were OK, it didn’t matter. We all looked yellow, by the way.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: They gave us pills to stave off the mosquito and--.
Ungemach: Malaria?
Chiocca: Malaria. And our skin was all yellow. We all looked like we were Japanese.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: I said, “Thank goodness my mother doesn’t see me looking like this!”
Ungemach: [laughs.] Where were you staying? Did they have a base or--?
Chiocca: Well, the airport was the main thing, and we were not staying at the airport. We were a mile away or something and we were all in huts, little bamboo huts that they put up. Two officers to a hut.
Ungemach: Mhm. The weather in India is like hot season--.
Chiocca: Three seasons.
Ungemach: Three seasons?
Chiocca: Three seasons. It was hot, cool, and rainy. [laughs.]
Ungemach: How was it adjusting to that? 25
Chiocca: The rainy season was hard. That was hard because you could get a tremendous amount of rain in any one day. And, I guess you could say, you went from the heat, when it was so hot that you couldn’t wait for the rains to come, and then when they came, there was so much of it that you couldn’t wait for it to leave. But basically, when it was very hot, even during the rain, we walked around in shorts and shoes and nothing. We had no insignia of who we were, officers and enlisted men, nobody cared what rank you were. And there was nothing formal, nobody saluted or anything, you just did your job. We looked like a bunch of slobs.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: But then, when it got cooler, that was more manageable, you could at least live through it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But either the hot season or the rainy season--. In other words, two-thirds of the time you were very uncomfortable. Some of the people got skin conditions from the rot and everything else. Luckily I didn’t.
Ungemach: Were there incidences of huts floating away or--?
Chiocca: In that area we were not near any big rivers that I can remember. The big rivers were nearer to the sea. Calcutta, of course, has huge rivers. In low spots, the ground would be filled with rain and all, but the runways were usually kept pretty good because the runways were put up quickly and so what they did, basically, was laid a flat ground, and then we put corrugated steel on the ground so the planes would land on the corrugated steel, so you kept it pretty good, pretty easy.
Ungemach: Mhm. 26
Chiocca: And an interesting thing: the first time I saw it, I didn’t understand what was going on but I looked at the airfield and there’s this huge airfield and it’s green from grass and weeds and so forth, and there’s a complete line of Indian men, sitting down on their haunches, with scissors in their hands, and their cutting the grass.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: 50 or 100 men across, moving down the runways, cutting the grass.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That’s what cheap labor means.
Ungemach: Jeez. Where you in contact with your family much when you were stationed in India?
Chiocca: No. You’d get a letter once in a while; you’d send a letter once in a while. It wasn’t very good contact, no.
Ungemach: I guess one of the interesting things is, you always hear about soldiers smoking or trading their cigarettes with other people for other things. Was there much of that going on?
Chiocca: A little bit there; liquor ration or beer ration. And you could do some trading. But there wasn’t much trade up there so I ended up giving a lot of stuff away. I didn’t smoke. I’d give it away. Later on, when I wasn’t in India, later it became a different thing. We’ll talk about that later.
Ungemach: Was it easy to hear about what was going on with Japan and with--?
Chiocca: We didn’t have much news. They had one line or something about some attack on an island or something but no real news. A little bit.
Ungemach: Did you have any contact with Indian military at all or was it just--?
Chiocca: British. 27
Ungemach: British?
Chiocca: British military, yes. We didn’t have much contact then with the British. Later on, after the Japanese were out and it was our business to leave India, that was another facet of what I got into.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I became a liaison officer between the American military and the British and then I would meet with the British.
Ungemach: Did you have much to do with them when you were at the airport?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No?
Chiocca: No. We ran our own show and the British had nothing to do with it. The British were there, what, hundreds of years and they were still using bathrooms with a pitcher of water and so forth. And we come in there and we build latrines and we have running water in the showers. It was cold water, but we had showers.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A completely different way of life. But we got along. There was no rancor.
Ungemach: Mhm. Did you have any contact with Indian civilians?
Chiocca: Sure. I had my man Friday, I had my own personal servant. It cost me a few cents a day and he would come here every morning and have my clothes ready for me when I got up and I’d shower, and clean up, put my clothes on, and I’d go out to work and he would stay there and get my clothes washed and ironed and everything else. Make the bed and all. A couple cents a day did it. It was easy. Everybody had them. Labor was so plentiful at almost no cost, everybody 28
had them. But, as far as with Indian civilians of a nature that had to do with our job, no. None whatsoever. We sort of took over.
Ungemach: Yeah. Did he speak English?
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: Yes?
Chiocca: They spoke English, yes. I didn’t speak Hindu, but they spoke English.
Ungemach: Was there any conversation about the British being there or about Gandhi at all?
Chiocca: No. There were riots at the end of the war against Japan and then India started to make their move. There were riots and the riots were mainly in the cities of Calcutta and so forth and when we were up north, up in the Himalayas, we didn’t know anything about it. Later on, when I was down in Calcutta, we were kept on base. We weren’t allowed in where the civilians were. We didn’t want to be involved in their troubles.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: But up north, no.
Ungemach: How long were you stationed up in the northern part of India? Did you move elsewhere?
Chiocca: No, I was there. I moved a couple places around up there. After Japan lost and we knew that the war was ending, then it became a problem of folding everything back in. That became a bigger job than I ever had before.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Because we had the whole Indian continent covered with people, which probably is the main part of the story, in a way. The decision gets made to get out and pretty soon you’re turning everything around and shipping people home and there was a question of how many ships can 29
we get in, not for me but for the higher ups, and we had to then prioritize who goes out. And there was a priority: married men with children, as long as they had some time there. If you just came in the week before, no, but if they’d been there a year or so, they got priority.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And at that point, most of the work becomes a question of closing down rather than operating systems and we start to close down all our bases where we had equipment for navigating across the Hump [slang for the Himalayan Mountains] and bringing all those people in. And that meant not only the people, but the station, the antennas, and all the equipment and bringing them in, collecting it and so forth and so on. And at first, it’s rather orderly and most of it was turned over to the Indian government. We brought almost nothing back to the United States.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Vehicles, all the equipment, the stations, the antennas, and so forth and so on. And we would get orders and I would be at meetings. By then I had been a captain and my commanding officer was a major and he had been there quite long, so he was one of those that got shipped out early [laughs] because he had been there long.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And suddenly I was in charge cause I was the highest ranking one there. So I was meeting with the higher-ups. We met the commanding general of the theater in India and he laid down the plan of how you would go about getting people out and so forth and so on. And finally I can remember very vividly the last meeting we had. He said, “OK.” By then we had gotten rid of a lot of people.
Ungemach: Mhm. 30
Chiocca: He said, “We will have the last troop ship in Calcutta at such and such a time. Get your men there or they’re going to swim home.” And we started really buckling down and it was a question of how do we get rid of all this stuff? We had equipment all over the place and a lot of it was just abandoned.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We didn’t have enough people to even try to move it anyplace; we just left it. I can remember turning some of it over to the Indian government and one morning we were expecting the government of India to show up to get official notice of it and this young man comes up. He’s got a clipboard and he’s looking and looking and I says, “What’s going on?” He says, “I came here to get the equipment.” I says, “Really?”
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: And we had Quonset huts, these are the big metal buildings that you put up temporarily, stacked with all this equipment that does everything you want. [taps table.] And I looked at him, I gave him the keys, and I thought, “Boy, that’s not going to last very long.”
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Wait till those people get a hold of this stuff. And we left. And he stood there looking, no guards or anything.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Millions of millions of millions of dollars of stuff left in there. That’s war. And I was very, very concerned. I had one last detachment down in the southern part of India and we had wired them about getting back, but some of the wires were down and some of the equipment wasn’t working right, and we never heard what happened. And I was really worried because there was that ship that was leaving and they had to get on there. And finally, the night before, 31
this railroad train comes up with four or five cars on it and the commander of the unit gets off and he said, “We had a tough time. We commandeered a railroad.”
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And they had their cars on there, they had jeeps, and all the equipment, and I said, “We’re just going to throw it away, you should have just left it there.” Well, he didn’t know. So we got him and his men on board that day and there was just a few of us left. We had three aircraft left; one of them was for spare parts, one was for some food and more parts, and one was for personnel. And I had two or three men under me left and the supervising aid, they call him the ATC, that ran the airports and so forth, he had a bunch of men, and we took off. And we were going home. And we started to fly west. We flew over India, west, and flew to Cairo. No, that wasn’t it; no, no, I’m wrong. We stopped, where did we stop? [thinking.] Oh, I know. We stopped in Abadan [in Iran], one of those desert places where our forces were fighting when we were in Iraq, in there with all the sand. I can remember, we landed there at night, and we got out, and it must have been about 120 degrees in the shade. In the night. [laughs.]
Ungemach: [laughs.] Wow.
Chiocca: And all we saw was sand. And we just laid down and went to sleep for a while. And they fixed up the aircraft, gave us some more food, and we ate something, and then we took off and we went to Cairo. And then we stayed in Cairo for a couple of days, getting ready. We were supposed to be flying home. This was the remnants. The only people left behind in India were what were called the Gray’s Registration people. And they were there to see that anybody who had been killed would be taken care of. But the rest of us were out, so we were flying. So we left Cairo and the next stop was Naples and then we’d be flying home from there, I think. And I got to Naples and I was reporting; by then I was reporting to the next echelon, which was in--. I’m 32
sorry, we stopped in Rome [taps table.] and I was reporting to the next echelon above me, which was in Naples. And I called the commander there and I told him we were in Rome and he said, “Come down to Naples.” “No,” I said, “I’ve got orders to report back to the United States.” He says, “Come down, come to Naples.” I said, “I’m on--.” He said, “Forget it. Come down.” So I took all my stuff off the aircraft and people wouldn’t believe me. “You’re leaving?” I said, “I’ve been told to go to Naples.” So I went to Naples, grabbed a plane and went to Naples. And he talked to me for a while cause he had been my overseer from India, in Naples, so I didn’t know who the guy was, really. And he told me what they were doing in Naples and so forth, and he had a couple of things he wanted covered and he said, “But you haven’t had any R and R, rest and recuperation, for 2 years.” I says, “Right.” So he says, “Take a breather.” So he put me on two weeks, sent me to Switzerland. [laughs.] And I just relaxed for a while. And then I came back and I’m ready to go home. And he says, “Well, I need somebody, I’ve got something to do.” I said, “I’m going home.” He says, “I got something you’ve got to do.” So he was sending a group of men, I think it was 75 men or something like that, who were Air Corps Communication Specialists, but all of our training had been through the Signal Corps of the army. So he was sending these men to Paris, where the Signal Corps had a big school. And he needed a couple of people, so he gave me a junior officer, a lieutenant, and myself, and took this plane full of guys up to Paris. And they were there to be taught. And that was for 3 months. And my duties were every morning, I would show up at their camp, make sure they were there [laughs.] and I’d turn them over to the Army Signal Corps for training. And I had the rest of the day to myself, in Paris. So I learned French, I learned a lot about Paris, and I had a good time. And 3 months later, I went back to Naples, and he says, “I’ve got a good job for you.” “I don’t want it; I want to go home.”33
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: He says, “I got a good job, you’ve got to listen.” And he wanted to send me to Spain, which, of course, had been neutral in the war. And he said that he needed a communications guy down in Spain. He says, “No uniform. Civilian clothes. You’re not a member of the military. You’re civilian. You understand me?” And I says, “Yeah, I understand you.” I says, “No, I don’t want to go.” He says, “One year. You commit yourself to one year.” He made it sound real good. So I began to think about it. I got my mother and father, they’re elderly, wondering when I’m coming home, and he wants to get me into Spain, and it was good because it was liaison and it was undercover. And one year. And I finally didn’t get an agreement on what I wanted out of it. He couldn’t give into that. So, I didn’t go. I did come home. And that was the end of that.
Ungemach: Mhm. Just to backtrack and flesh things out. So, when did you first hear about the atomic bomb and the end of the war?
Chiocca: I think the day it happened.
Ungemach: The day it happened?
Chiocca: Yeah. Those things do travel fast.
Ungemach: Yeah. What did you think about that decision?
Chiocca: We didn’t know much about it. I think the civilians here learned more about it than we did. We’d get those news sniffs either on the teletype or some other message and we knew little about it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: We didn’t know that 60,000 people were incinerated. All we knew was that one big bomb was down there and blew up a whole city.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then that they decided to surrender?34
Chiocca: Yes, yeah. Well, they didn’t surrender after one bomb, it took two.
Ungemach: Yeah. So then you started closing up shop. Were you just in charge of the northern part by the Himalayas where you were or were you eventually in charge of--?
Chiocca: We were in charge of half of India, the eastern half; the western half was out of Karachi, which was on the other side of India. We had half of India, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, that was all under our charge. And I had men there all over. I traveled to some of those places. I never got to Singapore. I saw some of the others.
Ungemach: Where else did you go?
Chiocca: I stopped in Burma; I didn’t do much there, spent a few days in Siam, what’s now Thailand. That was one of our main places. And a few days in Vietnam in--. [taps table.] What’s the name of the city? I can’t even think of it. Not Hanoi, Hanoi was in the northern part. I can’t think of it. [Pause, thinking.] It was in Vietnam, it was French Indochina at that time.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And at that time, what I saw in Southeast Asia, that was the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, in Southeast Asia. It was gorgeous. Beautiful. French colonial style, very nice-looking.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: You felt it was civilization, whereas the other places--. Burma was very, very barren and backward. Burma we traveled in by jeep because we were stationed not too far from the border between India and Burma so we traveled there. The other places we had to fly in. And I never got to Singapore either. If the war had stayed on for a while, I would have gotten to all those places.
Ungemach: Mhm. You were taking down infrastructure.
Chiocca: Right.35
Ungemach: Gathering up all this equipment to do something with it.
Chiocca: Right. Equipment and men.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: One of the stations, as a matter of fact I think it was the station in Vietnam, I’m trying to think. I think it was Vietnam, we recalled them, everybody was coming back, the station commander was coming back, second lieutenant was a Chinese boy, a nice boy, and they were 20 minutes away from landing and the plane disappeared.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Never found it.
Ungemach: Jeez.
Chiocca: It went down in the water, everything. Never heard a word. We don’t know what happened. So we were closing everything and they were flying back.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: They left everything. They just came back with the men and the money. He was carrying the money that he had cause we all had money. We had to deal. It’s not like today where you deal on the Internet. You dealt with cash.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So you had money to pay for things.
Ungemach: Mhm. This was in exchange for what you were--?
Chiocca: When it was necessary, sometimes you needed something from the local market or if you needed to pay people, to do things, hiring help, to pay them.
Ungemach: Mhm. So you mentioned before that you ended up in Calcutta and that there were riots going on.36
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: In regards to--.
Chiocca: Yeah, that was on my way back, when I was finishing, yeah.
Ungemach: Do you know any more about what was happening then?
Chiocca: They were the skirmishes. This was the beginning of India’s desire to be free of the British and there were skirmishes. There were no big battles or anything, but you’d get the overnight skirmishing, of throwing bottles at people and some people being shot and killed. And we were just going to stay out of that; we didn’t want to be involved in somebody else’s problem. Cause the British were still there. So we were pretty well out. The only thing it meant was that we couldn’t get into the city or eat our food at a restaurant or something.
Ungemach: Was there any news about Gandhi, about what he was trying to do?
Chiocca: The Gandhi name was maybe out there, but to us it was just an uprising.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: A general uprising rather than--. The big name was not Gandhi, the big name was the Uprising of the People.
Ungemach: OK. When you were packing up stuff, did you have contact with the British or with any other Allied--?
Chiocca: With the British.
Ungemach: With the British?
Chiocca: Yeah. And with the Indians to a certain small amount; I told you about that.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Generally speaking we just left stuff. But with the British, yeah. Before we were packing up, even, I was with the British, in some meetings with them so they knew what we 37
were doing, just to keep them apprised. We pretty well did things on our own. We didn’t get support from the British; we didn’t ask for any. We just told them what we were doing.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Cause they would be staying there. We weren’t. We’d be leaving.
Ungemach: Mhm. Were there any African Americans in you contingent?
Chiocca: [thinking.] I can’t remember. I really can’t remember.
Mrs. Chiocca: It was at the time when they were segregated.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. I don’t think so.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Cause it was right after that that President Truman said, “No more segregated units.” There were blacks, but they were in their own units. And as far as the Air Force [Air Corps] was concerned, I know they had some pilots.
Mrs. Chiocca: [softly.] Tuskegee.
Mr. Chiocca: But I don’t remember any of them.
Ungemach: Mhm. So, was it just the officers who were on the planes out of--?
Chiocca: No, we had some enlisted men.
Ungemach: Enlisted men too?
Chiocca: Yeah, both. Yeah.
Ungemach: So it was by boat and by plane?
Chiocca: Well, it was 99.9% by boat.
Ungemach: By boat. OK.
Chiocca: The plane was just a cadre of the few people that were left. And the only thing we took on the plane was equipment to protect ourselves. If something went wrong and we had to get 38
down, we wanted replacement parts for some things and we probably wouldn’t have the right part anyway.
Ungemach: So then you ended up in Italy and [pause] then you said you got two weeks off in Switzerland before you had to go back down to Naples and--.
Chiocca: Right.
Ungemach: Before you got your other assignment.
Chiocca: So I went up to Rome and then I went up to Switzerland.
Ungemach: What did you do during the weeks in Switzerland?
Chiocca: What did I do what?
Ungemach: When you were in Switzerland?
Chiocca: Oh, we were on a tour! The military put on a tour. They actually had [laughs] tour guides and we got on a train and they took us to various places; we went up to the mountains. Just had trips around Switzerland. The city. We went to some of the cities. I don’t even remember. It was beautiful. And that was the lake area of Italy and Switzerland, that trip. And it was paid for by the government. I hadn’t had a day off in two years [laughs]. So, it was part of that. You were allowed a certain number of days and when you get into that kind of thing, they provide the wherewithal to give you some enjoyable time. So that’s what it was. Just having a good time.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then you went back to Naples and then got sent to Paris.
Chiocca: Paris, yeah. I think I had one or two trips to Rome for something as part of that trip. I don’t even remember. I went to Rome, but then we just flew up or jeeped up, I don’t remember. I know I went to Rome. But that was a day or two. Paris was three or four months.
Ungemach: Mhm. So you were basically just in charge of the men who were going to the--.39
Chiocca: School.
Ungemach: to the school.
Chiocca: Right. Because during the day they were being taught by the Army Signal Corps.
Ungemach: Mhm. Where were those men from?
Chiocca: From Naples.
Ungemach: Were they Italians or--?
Chiocca: Oh, no, no. These were American troops.
Ungemach: Who’d been in Naples?
Chiocca: Right. Who had been Naples, had come over. They were the new people who came in after the war because we weren’t getting out of Europe. We got out of India but we weren’t getting out of Europe. We had stations in Italy, we still do. We still have stations in Italy even today. So we had troops down there who needed more training to do the thing and the best place for it was where the Signal Corps had a school. They didn’t have any in Italy. See, at that time, our Air Corps was part of the army. So we had to go up to Paris to do that.
Ungemach: Paris.
Chiocca: Yeah. So, they were taught. I was there, I had an officer under me who ran things. They put you there mostly to take blame, so if something goes wrong you know who to blame.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: That’s the game.
Ungemach: So were you doing anything else while you were in Paris along with--?
Chiocca: [Shakes his head no.]
Ungemach: Not really?40
Chiocca: I just was responsible for that school, for that schooling of the men. I just made sure they were there and they were fed and clothed and so forth and so on. Each day they were turned over to another unit to do the schooling.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: So we were just holding their hands. Making sure they were there. And they weren’t about to leave! They were in a nice place! [laughs.]
Ungemach: Yeah. OK, then what did you do with your free time while you were in Paris?
Chiocca: I did a lot of sightseeing. Did a lot of sightseeing. And I learned quite a bit of French, how to use the subways, and got around very easily. So, it was good.
Ungemach: Mhm. And then, back to Italy briefly. Did you encounter any civilians in Italy?
Chiocca: Yeah, you encountered the civilians that are there to do housekeeping--. The armed forces always use local people to do a lot of things. And, of course, when I traveled, I met them, yes.
Ungemach: Mhm. What was their feeling about Americans being in--?
Chiocca: Oh, they loved it. They loved it. We were bringing in a lot of money. They had nothing left. The Nazis had stripped them completely. They had pulled the trolley cars out, taken the wires down to melt the copper wires, ripped up the rails for steel. So they were barren all over Italy, from north to south. So it was a rebuilding for them. They needed money and supplies to rebuild. I’m sure we poured a lot in.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I don’t know what the figures were but it was a lot. The other good thing about Naples rest and recuperation; they have some neat things, like I said about the trip through Switzerland. They had weekends, I think they were weekends, you could get a boat to the island of--.41
Mrs. Chiocca: Capri.
Mr. Chiocca: Capri.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And there was a long list of people waiting to go and I go up to sign up and there’s the sergeant who was running this, and he was one of my men from India.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: I hadn’t seen him in a year. And that was that. I got a boat every weekend.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Chiocca: Every weekend I had a Saturday and Sunday in Capri.
Ungemach: That’s nice.
Chiocca: It worked well. I say every weekend; two, three, four weekends, I don’t remember what it was. But it was beautiful. Very nice. And it was free.
Ungemach: [laughs.] That’s nice. And then, when you came back from Paris, the major wanted you to go to Spain.
Chiocca: Yeah.
Ungemach: But that didn’t work out?
Chiocca: Yeah. I’m putting it very simply; there’s two parts of the army. One is the regular army and one is the army of people who come on during a war.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And never the twain shall meet. They’ve got their neat little ways of keeping them separate. So my commission and everything I earned was because of the war. Now the army was going to be taken over by West Pointers. And now you’re getting back to the routines. And they wanted me to drop back a grade to first lieutenant.42
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And I said, “No. I’m a captain.” And I was a captain only as long as I stayed doing what I was doing. But to get back to something like that, they wanted to drop me to first lieutenant. And I said, “No. I won’t do it.” And we juggled that one around for a couple weeks and it couldn’t get done and I said, “Fine, I’m going home.”
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: [laughs.] They couldn’t stop me from going home at that point. So I went home. If they had agreed to leave me on as captain, with the possibility of being promoted more after that, I would have gone.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: It was a good opportunity, but I didn’t want to go back in rank.
Ungemach: Mhm. So you were going home in 1947 or thereabouts?
Chiocca: ’46.
Ungemach: ’46. So, what was it like going back home?
Chiocca: You mean the trip?
Ungemach: Well, the trip and the feeling of seeing--?
Chiocca: The trip was very routine, small ship, not the big thing that we were on with 5,000 troops on it and so forth. Very small ship. Thank goodness we didn’t run into rough weather or we would have felt it! [laughs.]
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: By the time I got back here, there was nobody to greet you anymore. The first group gets greeted, the second group, you’ve forgotten already.
Ungemach: Mhm.43
Chiocca: So I came back and signed all the papers and so forth and I was out.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Very simple. They asked me about continuing in the reserves and at first I didn’t know what to say. I said, “I don’t know, I’ll figure it out later.” So I didn’t resign or anything. So I was still kept on a reserve list. And that went on for a year or two and then finally I had to do something; either get involved and do something or I would be separated completely. And I decided I would continue with the reserves, which I did. And I continued until I had finished off 21 years in total.
Ungemach: Mhm. Had your brother been home before--?
Chiocca: Oh yes.
Ungemach: Yeah?
Chiocca: Yes.
Ungemach: So how was--?
Chiocca: He had gone back to teaching school, back to his old job.
Ungemach: And how were your parents?
Chiocca: Well, my father had closed up the place and retired. They were elderly and I think they looked to me as being there to help them and so forth and so on. Until she came along [points at Mrs. Chiocca].
Ungemach: Mhm. Was it difficult to adjust to life when you came home?
Chiocca: No, not really. I took a job, which was selling, for the National Cash Register Company and six months later I realized I wasn’t really enjoying it. And I left to look for another job. Went on from there. I was in sales, I kept in sales, but was somewhere else. And I never went back to teaching. I had just experienced so many different things that the thought of 44
teaching no longer really appealed to me. I did go back to Montclair, I talked to my professor, he offered me a job as an instructor and the pay was always [laughs] so low that I said, “No. No thanks.” Or I could have gotten back into the realm of science and teaching and so forth, but I didn’t want to.
Ungemach: Mhm. [pause.] Had you, by that point, heard about the Holocaust? About what Hitler had been doing?
Chiocca: Oh gosh. Not while I was in Europe. I don’t remember when I first heard about it. I didn’t hear it when I was in Europe. I guess after that I did but I can’t remember when the first time was. [pause.] Nope, I don’t remember.
Ungemach: Mhm. [pause.]
Chiocca: Might have heard something, but not something major, not with the pictures that we’ve become accustomed to and all.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Chiocca: I think that came later.
Ungemach: I think that’s about it. We’re at about an hour and 16 minutes, so--.
Mrs. Chiocca: Wow. I didn’t know you [Mr. Chiocca] could talk so much. I was listening to see if I missed anything over the last 56 years or 59 years.
Mr. Chiocca: No, I told you all of it.
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: It was an experience; some of it was good, some of it wasn’t so good, but it was an experience. Nobody ever shot at me. I was lucky from that angle.
Mrs. Chiocca: Well, if we didn’t go in the service, we probably wouldn’t have met again, wouldn’t have gotten married.45
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. I joined the American Legion and Doris was in the service also and that’s where we met.
Ungemach: Oh OK.
Mrs. Chiocca: But we lived in the same town all our lives, went to the same high school, he was a patient of the dentist I worked for, but we never met till after the war.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. I didn’t come home with a bride.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.] I didn’t come home with a husband either!
Mr. Chiocca: That was a sad, sad thing. When I was in Paris, I lived in a hotel.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: The troops had troop quarters but I lived in a hotel. And, somehow or other, that hotel became the place where some of the G.I.’s brides were brought in before being sent back to the U.S. The husbands might have been back in the U.S. but now they were bringing their brides back.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And I remember seeing these gals, most of them were gals from the countryside, they looked like they were the farmer’s daughter, with hay growing out of their ears and so forth. They were a sorry lot. Poor people. They had had a tough war. They didn’t have clothing right, they had suitcases that were not suitcases, they were carpetbags [laughs]. And their husbands were in the U.S. They had been brought back but now they were claiming their brides. Oh my gosh, seeing those people. It was sad. I wondered how they made out because once they landed in this country, it was so different than anything they’d ever seen.
Ungemach: Mhm.46
Mr. Chiocca: So different. Now that difference isn’t there. Now you get a country like France and they’re up on things the same as we are. We might not want to admit it, but they are. But then it was a lot different. I remember seeing those people--.
Mrs. Chiocca: You know you asked about African Americans in the service? Really, the only pilots were the Tuskegee [struggles.].
Mr. Chiocca: Tuskegee.
Mrs. Chiocca: Tuskegee pilots. They were a whole group.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: And when I was stationed down at--. When I went in, we were segregated just the white girls and that, no mixture at all.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: In fact, I was down in Georgia and they used to say, “Don’t be smart and sit in the back of the bus.”
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: Because blacks had to sit back there. And down there especially it was really segregated. Different.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. But little by little. The army held back, the Air Force, and it was the Air Corps first, was more lenient towards it. The Air Force was one of the first to use women in other than secretarial-type work. We had women in the control towers.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: That was unheard of. The army never did, or then it was the Air Corps. But they had women in the control towers. They had nurses and medical personnel, yes.
Mrs. Chiocca: WASPs too. The WASPs used to pilot--.47
Mr. Chiocca: They were not part of the military, the WASPs were not military.
Mrs. Chiocca: They weren’t in the military?
Mr. Chiocca: No. The WASPs were women who ferried planes from the manufacturer to airports or overseas and so forth. That’s what my brother was being trained for at one point.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: But they decided to cut off the men and use only women [laughs].
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And he landed in North Africa.
Mrs. Chiocca: See, when women went into service in World War II though, they went in to replace a soldier or that, to free him for active duty, so the women were really replacing a soldier so they could--. They didn’t go in to do any kind of combat like they’re doing now. It was a different attitude for them.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. And the blacks, whenever they were into something, they were in their own units, when you think of it.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: When Harry Truman said, “Integrate,” then they became part of all the units, but before that they had black units.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And in Italy, the fighting when we went from North Africa up through Sicily and into Italy, it was blacks who carried the load of that fighting, in the infantry.
Ungemach: Mhm.48
Mrs. Chiocca: During World War II, about the Japanese; we had some Japanese-Americans in California that were put into camps and that.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah.
Mrs. Chiocca: That was a hard thing. And yet, we had Japanese that were fighting in the service.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. It’s strange how you pigeon-hole people. We had brought Italian prisoners of war here, brought them in the U.S. so that we wouldn’t have to maintain them in prisons over in Europe. We had to send goods over to maintain the prisoners, so we just brought them over here. And Virginia had big camps of Italians. We had some here in New Jersey. And the people took to them. They used to take them home for Sunday dinner!
Ungemach: [laughs.] Jeez!
Mr. Chiocca: Well, in fairness, most of the Italian prisoners were not Nazis, were not Fascists. They were just put into the army because the government wanted them there. They were not in favor of what they were doing. So, they were not people that you’d be afraid of, whereas the German prisoners we had were very different. And when I was in the reserves, there was a captain in our unit who, I think he was a lawyer, and he was involved in interrogating the German prisoners of war to try to figure out who the real Nazis were. And he said that was really something because little by little, he could figure out who these Nazis were and they controlled the rest of the prisoners around them. Just like at gang prisons now. And he went out to figure out who these guys were and then they’d keep their eye on them. Even though they were a whole prisoner group, but there were prisoners that you kept an eye on. And they were the Nazis, so, of course, we didn’t like them. Unfortunately, we didn’t like any of the Germans. Even though the other guys were just carrying a gun because they had been told to carry a gun. [laughs.]49
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. But the Italians, for some reason or other, I know I heard about, they used to take them home for dinner on a Sunday. They let them leave the prison!
Ungemach: Jeez!
Mr. Chiocca: They didn’t want to go back to Italy. They wanted to stay here. [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: The Italians didn’t like to fight anybody.
Mr. Chiocca: That’s right. They weren’t fighters.
Mrs. Chiocca: It’s a long time ago.
Mr. Chiocca: When I was on that rest and recuperation thing and I went up to the northern part of Italy into Switzerland, I had an uncle who lived in Turin. And I went to see him. I knocked on his door.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: [slightly emotional.] It was really something. The Germans had stripped him, stripped him cold. They took everything.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Every piece of copper, everything. The building he lived in--. They had condominiums there; we didn’t know the word condominium.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: He owned two; he lived in one and he owned another one in another building, but we didn’t know that word. You didn’t own a piece of a building; we do now, but you didn’t then in the United States. And the big building he lived in had all the pock marks from the cannons that were hitting it. Big holes in the walls.
Ungemach: Jeez.50
Mr. Chiocca: Unbelievable. And the trolleys were all gone, they took them all, sent them back to Germany for melting. And Turin was a big manufacturing--. Fiat was Turin. And they stripped everything. So even the civilians were against the military part of it because they had a terrible time. Food was scarce.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: I can remember I had multi pieces of uniform that I had and I saw how bare everything was. And I took off the shirt and trousers; I made sure there wasn’t an insignia or anything, that they were all plain, and those things were well made. And I gave them to him and he cried.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: [slightly emotional.] To get something like that. He was stripped of everything. He had nothing. And he cried.
Ungemach: Was this your mother’s brother or you father’s?
Mr. Chiocca: My mother’s brother, yeah.
Ungemach: OK. Your family was originally from Italy?
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. My mother and father were from north Italy. They came here in the turn of the century. Before I was born. I was born here. It was a surprise. I walked in on him.
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: The American people, we’ve never had anything happen in the United States, so we don’t know what it’s like to go through all that they did in Europe and that.
Ungemach: Yeah. Because it completely fell apart. Just everything was gone. They had to start over. 51
Mrs. Chiocca: That’s why the Twin Towers was such a big thing. Just think over there that every town, England too--.
Ungemach: Yeah.
Mr. Chiocca: Strange things that happened come to mind. When I went up north I was on public transportation, a railroad car or something like that, and I was in uniform and I didn’t carry any--.
Mrs. Chiocca: Side arms.
Mr. Chiocca: Any arms, any side arms, no pistols, nothing. Now in Italy, if you were in uniform, if you were a policeman or anything, if you were street sweeping, you would carry firearms!
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And here I am in this railroad car and everybody looks upon me as a soldier; I was the only one. The rest of the Italians, they didn’t know that I could understand Italian. And they’re talking amongst themselves: “Look at this! Look at, here’s an officer; he doesn’t have any arms on him!”
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: “He doesn’t have a pistol on him!” It was strange because we carried arms when you were fighting, but other than that you didn’t. You never did. Never did.
Mrs. Chiocca: It’s changing there.
Mr. Chiocca: You got rid of them, put them back. But over there, everybody was armed.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mrs. Chiocca: It’s getting like that in the United States.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. Course, they didn’t know I probably couldn’t have hit the side of a barn if I had arms on me.52
Ungemach: [laughs.]
Mrs. Chiocca: [laughs.]
Mr. Chiocca: It was interesting that they thought that and that I was alone. Because, at that point, there was still a lot of in-fighting going on from the Fascists that were left with those who were against Fascism. 90% were against Fascism, but the 10% ruled. And these people were bad people. Bad people.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: And so you still had those people around and they would be armed. The rest of the people weren’t. So they would look at me, unarmed, going around alone.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: We look at the good thing in people. They had to look always at the bad things. So, can I answer any more questions? Ungemach: No, I think that’s perfect actually.
Mr. Chiocca: More than you expected. I hope it gives you what you wanted.
Ungemach: Yes.
Mrs. Chiocca: He didn’t have anything exciting about him, like escaping from prison or --.
Ungemach: That’s OK. I’d never heard of American troops being sent to India so when I heard that over the phone I was all excited so--.
Mr. Chiocca: Yeah. It’s different. Yeah. And I look at this on the map and we were in the province of Assam, A-s-s-a-m. And I looked at it on a map and its right of the border of Bangladesh.
Ungemach: Mhm.53
Mr. Chiocca: Now, that was all India then. Now it’s Bangladesh. So we were on the Indian end of the border but we were close to Bangladesh, which is, as you know, the world’s poorest nation. . . . [tangent about poverty in Bangladesh.] And here was Calcutta, biggest city in India. You don’t even hear about it anymore. It’s so far down in the dregs. . . . [returns to Bangladesh.] So that’s where we were stationed [Bangladesh], in that area. Near there; we were in the mountains. There were no towns nearby; a couple of shacks. There’s always a restaurant.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: Always a restaurant. And they could serve Chinese food or something; they could always sell you a couple of fried eggs. That was the other thing; walk in, “I’ll have some eggs.” Cause we always had plenty of meat. The U.S. army eats a lot of meat. So they’ll give it to you one way or another, but they always give you a lot of meat.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: But eggs, no; we couldn’t get eggs. And sometimes we’d just have a K ration. A package to eat. And other times, and we always kidded about it too; there’s the regular troops and then there’s the elite and we were just troops out doing the job, getting these goods over into China.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Mr. Chiocca: But we had a lot of people over from the Strategic Air Command with General, what was his name? He was chief of the Air Force. Lame [pronounced le-may]! They were his people; it was the air force that he had there for bombing Japan. Well, those people had steak,
Ungemach: [laughs.]54
Mr. Chiocca: They had ice cream. We would learn about it, but we never got any of it. So you had the elite of those pilots compared to those grunts that we had who were just moving goods into China for fighting a war. We didn’t get that.
Mrs. Chiocca: That’s every war. . . . [Tangent about George Washington in the Ford’s Mansion in Morristown, NJ.]
Mr. Chiocca: OK. We’ll let you go back to some important stuff.
Ungemach: [laughs.] Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Mr. Chiocca: You’re welcome.
--------End of first interview--------
[After finishing the transcript, I called Mr. Chiocca on Sunday, November 1, 2009 to clarify a few points and ask some of the questions I forgot during the main interview. I had my cell phone on speaker phone in order to record the phone call. The batteries in my recorder died after 5 minutes, so those initial minutes were lost and had to be redone. I had sent my list of questions to Mr. Chiocca via my parents beforehand so that he would have a chance to remember names and such. ]
Lisa Ungemach: How much older is your brother than you?
Mr. Chiocca: Ten years.
Ungemach: Ten years. OK. And what were your parents’ names?
Chiocca: Felix, F-e-l-i-x, and my mother was Enrichetta, E-n-r-i-c-h-e-t-t-a.
Ungemach: And her last name?
Chiocca: Boltri, B-o-l-t-r-i.
Ungemach: OK. Did you speak Italian as well as English at home?
Chiocca: Yes. Yes. As well as a dialect, a local dialect. 55
Ungemach: From where they were from in Italy?
Chiocca: Right. Which is incomprehensible as Italian [laughs]. So different.
Ungemach: Yeah. You said that after you finished your degree but before you went into service, you worked in a shipyard. Where was the shipyard?
Chiocca: It was in Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Hudson River.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And it was Bethlehem Steel.
Ungemach: OK. What were you doing there?
Chiocca: I was an electrician’s helper.
Ungemach: OK. What was the name of the captain you’d worked under in Florida and Langley Field and who met you at the dock in India?
Chiocca: That was Levenson, L-e-v-e-n-s-o-n.
Ungemach: OK. Were you working under him the entire time you were there?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No.
Chiocca: In India, he was at a different level. We were in the squadron level, he was in the troop level. So we saw each other, lived nearby, but we did not work together.
Ungemach: OK. The airport you were working in by the mountains was built just for the war, right?
Chiocca: Yes, that’s correct.
Ungemach: What was it called?
Chiocca: Chabua. It’s the name of the local town. C-h-a-b-u-a.
Ungemach: OK. And it was already built by the time you arrived?56
Chiocca: Oh yes.
Ungemach: OK. What was the name of the Indian civilian you hired as your--?
Chiocca: I can’t recall.
Ungemach: OK. When everything was getting closed down in India, you said there was a major who was shipped out before you were when you were left in charge of things. So, he wasn’t the same captain who had met you when you arrived, correct?
Chiocca: That is correct.
Ungemach: What was his name/
Chiocca: Major Ruth. His name was R-u-t-h. I don’t remember his first name.
Ungemach: OK. Then, again, when everything was getting closed down, I think you said something to the effect of having met a general in charge of the theater. What was his name? What was he doing?
Chiocca: Well, there was, of course, a general in charge of the Indian theater.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: The general that was in charge of the Air Corps part of it, the person--. Oh, I can’t think of his name. [laughs.] I can relate to him in this way: he was the person who came up with the idea of how to get the shipments over the mountains into China.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: And he made it work. This is just part of history though. Later on, if you remember history, after World War II was over, we got into a little hassle with the Russians and they tried to cut us off from Berlin.
Ungemach: Mhm.
Chiocca: Remember that--?57
Ungemach: Yes.
Chiocca: Environment? We were able to keep the people of Berlin alive by flying in food and coal to keep them warm the entire winter. We broke the back of the blockade put on by the Russians.
Ungemach: Yep.
Chiocca: The general they called in to do that job was the same general who came up with the idea in India.
Ungemach: Oh OK!
Chiocca: Before they got him to the Berlin Lift, we were losing.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: We were not going to be able to do it. But that general was the one who got us out of trouble in the Berlin airlift. Unfortunately, I can’t think of his name.
Ungemach: OK. The major that called you down to Naples after you’d landed in Rome--. He was you’re overseer while you had been in India, correct?
Chiocca: This is correct. He was a lieutenant colonel, not a major.
Ungemach: Oh OK. What was his name?
Chiocca: I can’t think of his name, either.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: I’ve been trying but I can’t think of it.
Ungemach: OK. What was the name of the Army Signal Corps [school] that you were taking the men to in Paris?
Chiocca: [thinking] I can’t remember the name of it. Army Signal Corps Communication Training School--. That’s about all I can think of Lisa.58
Ungemach: OK. You mentioned that when you were in India, there wasn’t much trade of cigarettes and the liquor or beer rations going on, so you gave most of your things away.
Chiocca: Right.
Ungemach: You said that later on, when you were no longer in India, that changed. So, was that when you were in Italy and Paris?
Chiocca: Yes. Mainly in Italy.
Ungemach: Mainly in Italy. OK. What changed? What was different?
Chiocca: Well, in India, there was nobody to buy--. The Indian people were so poor that they weren’t spending money on cigarettes or liquor. They needed to get the basics to live on.
Ungemach: Right.
Chiocca: In Italy, it was completely different. While they’d been though a war, there were people who wanted some things and had means to pay for them. So it was very easy. We didn’t trade much; you just sold the cigarettes to whoever wanted them in Italy. I don’t remember anything about liquor in India. I just can’t remember that. I remember selling the cigarettes; I didn’t smoke so it was easy to get rid of it. And you got cash for them.
Ungemach: OK. Was it any easier to communicate with your family when you were in Italy and Paris then it had been when you were in India?
Chiocca: No, the same. The United States Postal Service, the military postal service, was the same.
Ungemach: OK. You said when you were closing up stations in the eastern half of India and then in Burma and Vietnam, etc. we couldn’t remember the name of the city in Vietnam you visited. Was that Saigon?59
Chiocca: Yes. Yes, it was. It was a beautiful, old, French colonial city with gorgeous buildings and trees and boulevards everything else at that time. It had been pretty hard messed up by the war, so it was different.
Ungemach: Yeah. You were talking about dealing with money in order to pay people for things and such in India. Was it dollars or was it Indian currency?
Chiocca: We got paid in dollars. And, generally speaking, in a place like we were, we sent most of the money home. You got paid and you sent it back home again. You kept a few dollars which you could change into the local rupee mark so that if you were out buying something or having food in a restaurant or something, you would use the rupees.
Ungemach: OK. One last question. Do you know the name of the sergeant who’d been with you in India who gave you the weekend trips on the boat to Capri?
Chiocca: No.
Ungemach: No.
Chiocca: No, I can’t remember his name at all. [laughs]
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: I did give your mother a copy of a letter I had sent to one of my old--. Well, not my old, just somebody who had been in Chabua with us. This was many years ago. He was on the west coast and he had dropped me a letter and I sent him a letter. He asked me for an update and I sent him a letter. So I gave her a copy of that; there’s a lot of the things that were going on in India.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: I think she probably will transmit that to you.
Ungemach: Yes, I think I got that in an e-mail. [See Appendix 2]60
Chiocca: OK. Just some extra background and if you can find use for it, fine.
Ungemach: OK. I think that’s all my questions.
Chiocca: Oh, good. [laughs]
Ungemach: Yeah. The transcript is around 56 pages long right now so--.
Chiocca: So you’ve got to bring that down somewhat?
Ungemach: No! Oh, no. It’s meant to be that long. [laughs]
Chiocca: You mean I talked longer than I should have?
Ungemach: Oh no! No. The interview was meant to be an hour and a half. . . . So, after I make whatever changes I need to, I can send you a copy of it and of the interview, the recording.
Chiocca: OK. Good. Well, if you have any other questions, give me a call.
Ungemach: OK.
Chiocca: And I hope it goes well for you.
Ungemach: Yes. Thank you very much.
Chiocca: OK. Goodbye now.
Ungemach: Goodbye!Reflection on Experience
Part of the reason I love history so much is hearing about a person’s quirks or the odd coincidences that occur in everyday life. Even the “great white men” of our nation’s history have funny stories that make them more human in the telling. This interview gave me a new perspective on life during the Depression and World War II and I was given an opportunity to hear some of those stories.
I decided I was going to do my interview while I was at home over Reading Days. When I heard what the assignment was, I wished that my grandfather was still alive so I could have heard his story. I originally planned to interview my grandmother but had to change my plans when I discovered that she was not old enough. My parents then recommended that I interview Mr. D’Agati, a friend of my grandparents who had war experience. When I called him, he told me that he and his wife would be away that weekend. Mr. D’Agati suggested I try Mr. John Chiocca, another neighbor he said would be a good choice because of his clear memory and gregarious nature. I did not know Mr. Chiocca, but I had spent some time with two of his grandchildren, who are around my age, and Mr. D’Agati was so insistent that I decided to give Mr. Chiocca a call. He said he was available that Saturday (October 10) and would love to help out any way he could. The preliminary interview went very well and I knew I would have an interesting conversation with Mr. Chiocca because his experience was like none I had ever heard before: he graduated from college before going overseas and was stationed in India and Italy at the end of the war. I really needed to do some research before Saturday.
When I began researching the war in India, I gathered a host of new information. I learned about the Hump (slang for the Himalayan Mountains) and the shipments pilots were flying over to China to bolster their efforts against Japan. The war also played a role in India’s push for independence from Britain. Italy suffered a great deal during the fighting in Europe and I was interested to discover what it looked like by war’s end.
Nervous and excited, I arrived at the Chiocca’s home at 2 PM on Saturday afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca were very welcoming and we decided to conduct the interview at the kitchen table. Mrs. Chiocca sat with us and was very helpful at certain points. She had some fascinating insights to add towards the end and I think someone needs to take the time to hear her war story as well. I was suffering from a cold and sore throat, so I was not at my best, but I was very lucky in my interviewee. Mr. John Chiocca anticipated some of my questions and needed very little prompting to expand on a point or elaborate a story. His recollections were by turns serious and funny and his memory was impeccable; except for a few instances where dates or names escaped him, Mr. Chiocca was able to answer every one of my questions and told some fascinating anecdotes.
To further demonstrate the essence of Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca: I returned to their home the following day with flowers to say thank you to them both. Mrs. Chiocca opened the door, saw the flowers, and then said, “John! Your girlfriend brought flowers for you!”
The interview also confirmed some of the pointers we had been given about this kind of interview. Date-specific questions tend to foul people up and interrupt the flow of the story. Yes or no questions are very unhelpful, but if asked in an open-ended manner, they trigger memories and yield an incredible amount of information. It is essential to come with some questions prepared, which is why the preliminary interview and subsequent research were so important, but the interviewer must always be prepared to think on their feet, since it is impossible to ascertain where the interview is going to lead beforehand.Typing the transcription was an unusual experience. My tape recorder is digital, which allowed me to transfer the interview to my computer and listen to it in Windows Media Player. I copied the interview into a word document in stages and found that, while tedious, the actual process of transcribing was not very difficult. I was able to remember expressions and gestures Mr. Chiocca used and, in the several instances where Mrs. Chiocca spoke softly or at the same time as Mr. Chiocca, I could remember and understand what she had said. Listening to the interview was a fun experience because of Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca’s personalities and I am very glad that I have some of their recollections recorded.
After completing the transcript and listening to it to ensure I had not missed anything, I created a list of questions that I had forgotten to ask Mr. Chiocca in the first interview. Since most of them referred to names, I decided I would send them to him beforehand so that he would have an opportunity to remember some of them. As I had also forgotten to take a current picture or ask for a war-time one, I e-mailed the questions to my parents and they delivered them and took the pictures. When looking for some of the names, Mr. Chiocca had found a letter he had written to a man on the west coast who had served in the same Indian town. My parents copied it, along with two war-time pictures and several present ones, and sent them back to me. The letter is included after the pictures and is much more technical and specific.
This experience was an excellent introduction to oral histories and I feel prepared to have another conversation with someone else. I also learned more about the Depression and World War II and I hope to have the opportunity to gather more such stories in the future. Appendix 1
Mr. Chiocca’s official picture Mr. Chiocca in India
Mr. Chiocca now Mr. and Mrs. Chiocca nowAppendix 2